Last night I went to the public launch of 1.5 Degrees: Meeting the challenges of the Paris Agreement - http://www.1point5degrees.org.uk/
Excellent set of talks, discussions and Q&A on meeting the challenges of keeping global warming to below 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Will be interested to see the results of the rest of the conference, especially how the matter of global justice is treated, on top of the technical and geopolitical aspects.
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Through the ages, people have moved between countries. Either they are running away from something, or attracted towards something else. Whatever the driver, they seek a better life for themselves, and often for their children. Go back a few tens of thousands of years and the islands of the UK had no human inhabitants at all. Reflecting on those timescales, , all of us currently living permanently in the UK are migrants or are descended from migrants.
So it saddens me when I hear some people talk in ways that indicate that their underlying philosophy is what could be described as “fortress UK” – draw up the drawbridge and keep them out. A modified version of this is “keep them out, unless they have skills we need and can’t get locally”. This is still essentially the same thing, or perhaps even worse. It’s saying those people are prepared to accept people in as wage slaves but not if they need help and might be a net cost to our welfare state. What an appalling underlying set of assumptions lurk beneath these opinions. The assumption that we’re not interested in letting people into our country unless they can show a net positive financial contribution. To reduce them to mere economic statistics towards a flawed measure of success – GDP. If we are all migrants, or descended from migrants, what legacy do we think our migrant ancestors would be proudest of – a stance that creates a fortress and protects a population’s comfort and greed or a stance that respects and supports human spirit and endeavour which resides in people who uproot themselves and seek a better life. Maybe people who build fortresses find it difficult to comprehend and empathise until their walls (or their bodies and minds) crumble and decay through ossification and they have to venture outside them for support, warmth, or even just for essential services they can’t provide for themselves (eg health services). In a sense, the answer to this is both everybody and nobody. The most valuable assets in the World Balance Sheet will be the global commons - the atmosphere, the ecosystems, the water and carbon cycles etc. Nobody owns them. Even where we have agreed property rights, eg on land, morally the property owners don't actually own the animals that visit the land or make their homes on it. They don't own the air above it or the sunlight and rain that falls on it.
What we need is a Global Governance Body ("GGB"), that would be the custodian of the World Balance Sheet on behalf of humanity. The main role of the GGB would be to ensure proper stewardship of the assets. Another role would be to ensure effective distribution of the essential supplies and services sustainably sourced and provided within the global welfare system, for example under a Global Welfare Insurance Scheme. A third role would be to regulate allowable trade within limits to ensure market forces don't compromise long-tern sustainability of the system of systems on Earth. So perhaps in another sense the GGB would be the owner of the World Balance Sheet, on behalf of us all. Might the United Nations perform this function of GGB? Perhaps. Let's set out a challenge to everyone involved in housing to find ways of building homes that makes them affordable to the neediest, provides minimal ecological footprint on the planet, and reversible in the sense that the land can easily be returned to a healthy natural state after the building is no longer required. A key financial consideration is to make it so affordable that most people wouldn't even need a mortgage to fund it, and even if they needed funding, mortgage providers would be prepared to offer cheap mortgages on such buildings.
It's possible to take some inspiration from the LLamas development in Wales - link here (opens in new window). There, each plot holder has a 999 year lease and they are allowed to build on condition that the land be returned to its natural state at the end of the lease. |
AuthorThe Planetary CFO - working towards a sustainable World Balance Sheet. Categories
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