A worldwide scientific collaboration, a world consortium of nationally funded institutes, is a proposal that needs to be pursued, with the goal of determining practical ways humanity might intervene.
Greenwashing
We usually are not, nonetheless, ranging from nothing – there are several vital proposals within the United Nations Secretary-General’s 2021 report, Our Common Agenda, to enhance the mechanics of worldwide governance that might be immediately fast tracked.
These include an emergency plattform, an envoy for the longer term and the UN’s Trusteeship Council as multi-stakeholder bodies to tackle emerging challenges and to act to preserve our global commons.
It is evident that only with latest kinds of worldwide cooperation can we take care of this complex web of interlocking and reinforcing global risks to make sure a habitable, protected and peaceful future.
None of those risks respect national borders – global collaboration to review solutions from a multi-national, multi-risk perspective is the one way forward.
That is the form of collaboration we hoped for on the COP27 climate talks – as an alternative, we saw flimsy net zero goals, greenwashing and a failure to drive the motion required to stick with the Paris Agreement targets.
Crisis-hopping
Worryingly, at this global summit to tackle climate breakdown, the fossil fuel contingent, totalling 636 people, outnumbered any national delegation aside from the UAE, 70 of whom were connected to fossil fuel extraction.
The COP15 biodiversity summit took place in Montreal, Canada, nearly two years later than originally scheduled because of the pandemic – whilst we face one more crucial moment for the longer term of the planet.
The selections made at COP15 could also be our last likelihood to conserve the natural world and our existence as we realize it within the face of an enormous extinction event.
Five of the nine interconnected planetary boundaries that underpin the steadiness of worldwide ecosystems, allowing human civilisation to thrive, are estimated to have been exceeded.
Tackling ecological collapse and climate breakdown needs to be top of the world’s ‘to do’ list in 2023. But to do that effectively, we’ll need latest sorts of cooperation able to coping with the complexities on the intersections. ‘Crisis-hopping’ is not any response to a set of existential risks that threaten the longer term of individuals and planet.
This Creator
Jens Orback is the chief director of the Global Challenges Foundation.
