04 Feb Chirac Calls for a New World Environmental Organization
President Chirac of France announced yesterday that France and 46 nations will begin deliberations to replace the United Nations Environmental Programme with a more powerful world environmental body. Coming on the heels of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report on climate change, Chirac called for “the transformation of the UNEP into a genuine international organisation to which all countries belong, along the lines of the World Health Organisation.” Chirac also apparently is calling for environmental protection to be enshrined as a fundamental human right.
Ideas for creating a World Environmental Organization have been kicked around for many years. (See here for one of the better discussions of the pros and cons of such an organization.) I doubt the case has been made, yet. The problem of climate change is not the lack of a centralized international organization, but rather the lack of commitment among key states (read China, India, the U.S., and Russia) to the reduction of greenhouse. Unless someone can explain how the organization can foster such commitments, I doubt Chirac’s proposal will amount to anything.
Thanks for the link to the Charnovitz paper which, while it does indeed discuss the pros and cons of such an organization, concludes by ‘explain[ing] that while some of the arguments for a WEO are not convincing, compelling arguments do exist for a WEO.’
In an essay from the latest issue of Boston Review (Vol 32, No. 1; available online, this issue has a handful of articles about global warming) Nicholas Stern notes that ‘Climate change is a global problem, and solutions will require coordinated action by rich and poor countries, based on a shared vision of long-term goals and mutually reinforcing approaches at the national, regional, and international level. With a globally shared vision, policy can then reap the benefits of joint action and global markets for the lower carbon technologies that will be necessary. Action need not be anti-business or anti-growth—in fact, failing to act is anti-growth, since it risks the future of growth itself. A transformation of global infrastructure and an investment in energy, transport, buildings, and agriculture offers new opportunities and markets.
But these markets can only be created at scale if an effective global response is realized. Climate change is the biggest market failure the world has ever seen, and strong policy will be necessary to correct it. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol provide a basis for international cooperation, but more ambitious action is required, and economics has to be at the heart of any serious discussion of how to proceed. [….]
Global collective action. You can’t conjure collective action out of the air, especially when interests partially conflict. All the players need to understand the implications for them, their growth, their mortality rates, and the survival of species and natural flora and fauna in their country. In addition, policy has to take into account equity and fairness in the burdens of adjustment. The rich countries are primarily responsible for where we are now. But the poor countries are going to be major contributors to future emissions, so even if the rich world takes on responsibility for absolute cuts in emissions of 60 percent to 80 percent by 2050, developing countries must take significant action too. Moreover, the costs of taking action are not evenly distributed across sectors or around the world. So developing countries should not be required to bear the full costs of this action alone. But they will not have to. Carbon markets in rich countries are already beginning to deliver flows of finance to support low-carbon strategies of economic development, including through the Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism (which permits countries to achieve emissions reductions by investing in projects in developing countries that reduce emissions and that would not have otherwise happened). A transformation of these flows is now required to support action on the scale required. [….]
John Stuart Mill talked a lot about the role of public discussion in a democracy. Like earlier political philosophers, Mill understood the important role of public discussion in forming our attitudes and preferences. So incentives—and institutions to support the incentives—will be fundamental, as will information and analysis. But we also need the process of public discussion: of exchanging ideas, changing preferences, constructing new norms and ideas of personal and collective responsibility, and building mutual understanding across nations and across generations.’
I think Stern offers reasons that either supplement or support those in the Charnovitz paper. In any case, I would think that the more countries committed to a WEO, the greater the likelihood some pressure would be brought to bear on nations with weak commitments (i.e, insufficient political will). In another article from the Boston Review the authors note that ‘China has taken a wait-and-see approach in the international climate change negotiations, unwilling to discuss making a commitment to reduce emissions until the developed world demonstrates its own commitment to do so.’ We have to start somewhere, and a WEO could serve as the appropriate signal to all parties of the seriousness and scope of the problems raised by global warming, in addition to providing the communicative and coordinating mechanisms now lacking in existing fora. We need not endow such an organization with messianic hopes to appreciate its possible role in combating at least the most egregious effects on the global ecological commons of global warming.
I don’t see the existance of the required political will. More likely, Chirac just wants to show he’s “doing something” on the issue.