What now?
The everyday actions of each individual can produce social change. But we are at a point where it is the actions of people who influence the provision of services that will be the most pivotal in directing global change.
Keenly sceptical of the recent proliferation of cultural or charitable "days" that must be marked down in one's calendar, I approached World Environment Day (WED) with a healthy scepticism. I think of Mother's Day and hope that WED doesn't seek to mimic its logic. As my father says, mothers should be celebrated every day - though my mother never complained about getting a card and some chocolates.
And we could go on... birthdays for example. It would hardly be memorable to celebrate the moment we were born every day. On the other hand, Mother's Day certainly has a higher profile than WED. So perhaps should we consider sending our loved ones "Happy WED" recycled and recyclable cards? We could off-set the carbon cost of postage by walking to work. After all, in the west buying the product is our favoured way of communicating a message.
On a more serious note, the urgency of climate change is such that one can't afford to scoff at one-day campaigns. Yes, the process of rethinking our relationships to the environment is difficult and complex and shouldn't be posited as a task to be completed in one day. At least WED stimulates a space in which to think about this.
Next week the Norwegian city of Tromsø will host this year's WED. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has chosen to focus squarely on the subject of climate change. Melting Ice - A Hot Topic? aims to raise the profile of climate change. The interest in ice is designed to highlight 2007-2008 as the first International Polar Year, a research campaign concentrating on the effects of climate change on polar ecosystems and communities.
Coinciding with WED on June 5, the G8 summit is set to table a new global agreement that will supersede the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which ceases to take effect in 2012. Signing up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 nations pledged their commitments to the reduction of CO2 emissions. Governments that then went on to ratify Kyoto legally bound themselves to meet specific national, or in the case of the EU, trans-nationally negotiated, targets.
Japan has already taken the lead with plans to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent by 2050. At the same time, the reticence of the US to participate, as well as Russia, China and India, threatens the global nature of the agreement.
As news of failed talks hit the headlines, open access US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the latest research, concluding that CO2 emissions between 2000 and 2004 rose at three per cent per annum, compared with 1.1 per cent between 1990 and 1999. This rate of increase is faster than that used in the worst-case scenario developed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In the face of these statistics, what is the role of WED? In the manner of think global, act local, WED asks us to get involved. But what does it propose "we"do? WED is designed "to give a human face to environmental issues". Accordingly, the emphasis is on community-based education that is fun for the kids. WED is "a people's event with colourful activities such as street rallies, bicycle parades, green concerts, essays and poster competitions in schools, tree planting, as well as recycling and clean-up campaigns".
It all sounds fairly innocuous, the usual spiel that serves to make possible the image of living in a better, more peaceful world, where people are respectful of one another's differences. But I wonder who will be participating, and who will be educated? I realise there are several reasons why I am concerned about WED as a conscious-raising plea.
First, there is this notion of WED as the project of giving "a human face to environmental issues". Is this the face of the "general public"? Or, is it the face of the deferred victims of climate change, the people upon whose behalf "we" must act?
To the question Melting Ice - A Hot Topic?, WED organisers offer this response: "Ask a polar bear, a farmer, an islander, an insurer, an indigenous person", each person/animal being complete with a photograph depicting a racialised, stereotypical image. The "insurer" is the only white male.
These are the people who will need saving from the increase in droughts, heatwaves, from the effects of sea erosion and flooding, from stronger hurricanes and more erratic weather. If it is the face of people living in the Third World and the unborn generations who will suffer, there is a risk that ethical decisions are being framed as a matter of charity. The discourse is one of victimisation; we the worldly public are encouraged to make moral decisions on the basis of "saving" someone other than ourselves, someone at the mercy of climatic change.
Isn't it the politicians who are going to fall victim? In 50 years, won't we look back to scorn at the faces of those who failed to act, including ourselves? I suppose the UN could hardly sponsor the view that the human face of environmental issues is George Bush, not a nameless, non-white Third World farmer.
A second point to raise is the emphasis of WED on the education of young people. Surely we all know that we should recycle. But who does, and who doesn't, and why? What is the role of decision-makers, of councils and local governments, in the provision of services that enable us to be more green?
There is an insinuation that educating the younger generations in 2007 will produce something different, more progressive, than it did in 1997, or 1987. People at school in the 1980s are now in positions of power. They know about the urgency of the need to act. They have read the last IPCC report, which states in plain terms that billions will be affected by the end of the century if drastic change does not occur.
Is it the children who need educating or the politicians?
Third, there is the perverse call to celebrate as the UNEP confidently asks "How can you celebrate World Environment Day?".
We are cheered on by an alphabetical list of "77 ways to celebrate". For example, C is for carpools, celebrity support, clean-up campaigns, competitions (banner, drawing, essay, painting, poster, poetry), conferences on the environment, and W is for waste collection, waste composting, workshops, write plays, poems, songs, write letters to your civic leaders (or better, forward the pre-written ones from the Greenpeace website) etc. It looks like the contents of a classroom brainstorming session.
What, exactly, are we celebrating? I don't see the impeding doom of environmental catastrophe, and the reluctance of the global political and economic community to act with the severity and immediacy that is needed, as reason to celebrate. The destruction of the environment has already occurred to an irrecoverable degree. The agenda on climate change is damage limitation, not prevention.
WED asks us to think about a "safer and more prosperous future", promoting "the environment" as all positive. There is to be no doom and gloom on WED; as if that will encourage people to get involved. It's not a grounded agenda. While it is vital to teach children about the value of the natural environment, it must be recognised that people develop a green sensibility because they are unhappy with the situation. People get involved in environmentalism, as they do with feminist, gay, anti-racist and civil rights movements, because they are angry about the roots of social injustice in our cultural, political and legal institutions.
In the task of working out how it is that "we" should live differently, we need go over what has happened and ask how we got to this point. Instead of celebrating, what about the call to remember?
We can remember the fact that climate change has already happened, and will continue unless we make changes to the way we live. We can remember, every time we take our glass bottles back to the shop or to the recycling bin; every time we switch off a TV or computer rather than leave it on standby; every time we change an inefficient light bulb for an energy-saving one; every time we don't leave our mobile phone chargers plugged in when the power is not switched off... and so on. We can remember the environment at many points every day.
My fourth and final thought. WED is a campaign to "empower people to become active agents of sustainable and equitable development". A positive framework I support: the everyday actions of each individual can produce social change. But we are at a point where it is the actions of people who influence the provision of services that will be the most pivotal in directing global change. It is the provision of additional public services that will enhance people's capacities to care for their own environment. As such, I am sceptical of a multi-state sponsored campaign that emphasises the responsibilities of people rather than people in organisations that can effect change.
The EU's You Control Climate Change campaign runs into similar problems, though their website is excellent in terms of informative advice about what you can do.
The campaign to prevent further climate change is a global project that connects each and every one of us. We are witnessing a moment in history where the force of those connections among every photosynthesising and food-digesting living thing is more complex and fast changing than ever before. The environment is what sustains us; for things to change, we have to stop thinking about that fact as if it belongs to some obscure hippy ideology. And when I say "we", I am less interested in you and I than I am in certain governments whose positions of influence come to represent us all. What is conjured by "the environment" is the fact that we all live within an ecosystem that is not apart from us, yet that we do not inhabit in equal ways.
Perhaps then, World Environment Day presents us with an opportunity to remember that.
Little known facts about climate change
The earth has warmed by approximately 0.75°C since pre-industrial times. Eleven of the warmest years in the past 125 years occurred since 1990, with 2005 the warmest on record. There is overwhelming consensus that this is due to emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), from burning fossil fuels.
Examination of ice cores shows there is more CO2 in the atmosphere than at any time in the past 600,000 years. Between 1960 and 2002, annual anthropogenic global emissions of CO2 approximately tripled. They rose by about 33 per cent since 1987 alone.
Warming in this century is projected to be between 1.4°C and 5.8°C. The impacts of climate change are already visible. Examples include: the shrinking Arctic ice cap; accelerating sea level rise; receding glaciers worldwide; thawing permafrost; earlier break-up of river and lake ice; increasing intensity and duration of tropical storms; lengthening of mid- to high-latitude growing seasons; and shifts in plant and animal ranges and behaviour.
In the Arctic, as peat bogs thaw they are releasing methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Scientists are increasingly concerned about the possibility of abrupt climate change, including reductions in ocean currents, such as the Gulf Stream which warms Europe, and changed patterns of rainfall, such as the monsoon seasons, which would affect food security for billions of people.
20070602-lifestyle--cover2.jpgAsk a polar bear...
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average. The area of the Arctic Ocean covered by ice each summer has been shrinking, and the remaining ice is becoming less thick. Because more heat is absorbed by the sea than by ice, a feedback is created which results in further melting.
Polar bears depend on sea ice, where they hunt seals and use ice corridors to move from one area to another. Pregnant females build winter dens in areas with thick snow cover. They have not eaten for five to seven months when they emerge with their cubs in the spring. They need good spring sea-ice conditions for their own and their cubs' survival.
Some climate models project there may be an almost complete loss of summer sea-ice in the Arctic before the end of the century. If this happens, polar bears are unlikely to survive as a species.
Ask a farmer...
Although crop yields may increase in some areas due to climate change, the negative effects are likely to dominate as warming increases. Africa is especially vulnerable, and studies warn there may be a significant increase in hunger.
Poor communities are most directly dependent for their livelihoods on a stable and hospitable climate. They often rely on rain-fed subsistence agriculture, and are deeply dependent on climatic phenomena, such as the Asian monsoons. They are also most vulnerable to extreme weather events such as droughts and tropical storms.
As glaciers melt in the world's great mountain ranges, water supplies to rivers will be affected. In Europe, eight out of nine glaciated regions show significant retreat.
Between 1850 and 1980, glaciers in the European Alps lost approximately one-third of their area and one-half of their mass.
Ask an islander...
In the past 100 years, global sea level rose between one and two millimetres a year. Since 1992 the rate has increased to about three millimetres a year, primarily through thermal expansion of warming oceans and freshwater flowing into the oceans from melting ice.
Melting ice is responsible for a significant portion of the observed sea level rise, with the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets the largest contributors. The Greenland Ice Sheet is melting faster than new ice is being formed. In the Antarctic, three large sections of ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula have collapsed over the past 11 years, followed by a marked acceleration and thinning of glaciers that were held back by the shelves.
As sea levels rise, inhabitants of low-lying islands and coastal cities face inundation.
Ask an insurer...
In 2005 the Munich Re Foundation estimated economic losses due to weather-linked disasters, such as tropical storms and forest fires, at more than $200 billion, with insured losses at more than $70 billion. This compares with 2004, the previous most costly year, when economic losses totalled around $145 billion and insured losses reached some $45 billion.
Continued global warming is expected to cause shifts in the geographic range (latitude and altitude) and seasonality of certain infectious diseases, including vector-borne infections such as malaria and dengue fever, and food-borne infections, such as salmonellosis, which peak in the warmer months.
Some health impacts may be beneficial. For example, milder winters may reduce the seasonal winter-time peak in deaths in temperate countries.
Ask yourself...
There are many options available to avoid catastrophic climate change. These include worldwide improvements in energy efficiency and a shift to low-carbon and renewable resources such as solar and wind power, bio-energy and geothermal energy. There is also potential for capturing and storing CO2, while a number of analysts consider that nuclear power could play a significant role,
The Global Wind Energy Council estimates that over a third of the world's electricity could be generated by wind by 2050.
A low-greenhouse gas future will also need to include social changes.
From Vietnam to Australia, Kenya to Mexico, people are banding together to plant trees. Trees can slow climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide as they grow. They also help to reduce pollution, keep cities cool, protect water catchments and reduce soil erosion.
• Ms Cefai is doing her PhD in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.
And we could go on... birthdays for example. It would hardly be memorable to celebrate the moment we were born every day. On the other hand, Mother's Day certainly has a higher profile than WED. So perhaps should we consider sending our loved ones "Happy WED" recycled and recyclable cards? We could off-set the carbon cost of postage by walking to work. After all, in the west buying the product is our favoured way of communicating a message.
On a more serious note, the urgency of climate change is such that one can't afford to scoff at one-day campaigns. Yes, the process of rethinking our relationships to the environment is difficult and complex and shouldn't be posited as a task to be completed in one day. At least WED stimulates a space in which to think about this.
Next week the Norwegian city of Tromsø will host this year's WED. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has chosen to focus squarely on the subject of climate change. Melting Ice - A Hot Topic? aims to raise the profile of climate change. The interest in ice is designed to highlight 2007-2008 as the first International Polar Year, a research campaign concentrating on the effects of climate change on polar ecosystems and communities.
Coinciding with WED on June 5, the G8 summit is set to table a new global agreement that will supersede the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which ceases to take effect in 2012. Signing up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 nations pledged their commitments to the reduction of CO2 emissions. Governments that then went on to ratify Kyoto legally bound themselves to meet specific national, or in the case of the EU, trans-nationally negotiated, targets.
Japan has already taken the lead with plans to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent by 2050. At the same time, the reticence of the US to participate, as well as Russia, China and India, threatens the global nature of the agreement.
As news of failed talks hit the headlines, open access US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the latest research, concluding that CO2 emissions between 2000 and 2004 rose at three per cent per annum, compared with 1.1 per cent between 1990 and 1999. This rate of increase is faster than that used in the worst-case scenario developed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In the face of these statistics, what is the role of WED? In the manner of think global, act local, WED asks us to get involved. But what does it propose "we"do? WED is designed "to give a human face to environmental issues". Accordingly, the emphasis is on community-based education that is fun for the kids. WED is "a people's event with colourful activities such as street rallies, bicycle parades, green concerts, essays and poster competitions in schools, tree planting, as well as recycling and clean-up campaigns".
It all sounds fairly innocuous, the usual spiel that serves to make possible the image of living in a better, more peaceful world, where people are respectful of one another's differences. But I wonder who will be participating, and who will be educated? I realise there are several reasons why I am concerned about WED as a conscious-raising plea.
First, there is this notion of WED as the project of giving "a human face to environmental issues". Is this the face of the "general public"? Or, is it the face of the deferred victims of climate change, the people upon whose behalf "we" must act?
To the question Melting Ice - A Hot Topic?, WED organisers offer this response: "Ask a polar bear, a farmer, an islander, an insurer, an indigenous person", each person/animal being complete with a photograph depicting a racialised, stereotypical image. The "insurer" is the only white male.
These are the people who will need saving from the increase in droughts, heatwaves, from the effects of sea erosion and flooding, from stronger hurricanes and more erratic weather. If it is the face of people living in the Third World and the unborn generations who will suffer, there is a risk that ethical decisions are being framed as a matter of charity. The discourse is one of victimisation; we the worldly public are encouraged to make moral decisions on the basis of "saving" someone other than ourselves, someone at the mercy of climatic change.
Isn't it the politicians who are going to fall victim? In 50 years, won't we look back to scorn at the faces of those who failed to act, including ourselves? I suppose the UN could hardly sponsor the view that the human face of environmental issues is George Bush, not a nameless, non-white Third World farmer.
A second point to raise is the emphasis of WED on the education of young people. Surely we all know that we should recycle. But who does, and who doesn't, and why? What is the role of decision-makers, of councils and local governments, in the provision of services that enable us to be more green?
There is an insinuation that educating the younger generations in 2007 will produce something different, more progressive, than it did in 1997, or 1987. People at school in the 1980s are now in positions of power. They know about the urgency of the need to act. They have read the last IPCC report, which states in plain terms that billions will be affected by the end of the century if drastic change does not occur.
Is it the children who need educating or the politicians?
Third, there is the perverse call to celebrate as the UNEP confidently asks "How can you celebrate World Environment Day?".
We are cheered on by an alphabetical list of "77 ways to celebrate". For example, C is for carpools, celebrity support, clean-up campaigns, competitions (banner, drawing, essay, painting, poster, poetry), conferences on the environment, and W is for waste collection, waste composting, workshops, write plays, poems, songs, write letters to your civic leaders (or better, forward the pre-written ones from the Greenpeace website) etc. It looks like the contents of a classroom brainstorming session.
What, exactly, are we celebrating? I don't see the impeding doom of environmental catastrophe, and the reluctance of the global political and economic community to act with the severity and immediacy that is needed, as reason to celebrate. The destruction of the environment has already occurred to an irrecoverable degree. The agenda on climate change is damage limitation, not prevention.
WED asks us to think about a "safer and more prosperous future", promoting "the environment" as all positive. There is to be no doom and gloom on WED; as if that will encourage people to get involved. It's not a grounded agenda. While it is vital to teach children about the value of the natural environment, it must be recognised that people develop a green sensibility because they are unhappy with the situation. People get involved in environmentalism, as they do with feminist, gay, anti-racist and civil rights movements, because they are angry about the roots of social injustice in our cultural, political and legal institutions.
In the task of working out how it is that "we" should live differently, we need go over what has happened and ask how we got to this point. Instead of celebrating, what about the call to remember?
We can remember the fact that climate change has already happened, and will continue unless we make changes to the way we live. We can remember, every time we take our glass bottles back to the shop or to the recycling bin; every time we switch off a TV or computer rather than leave it on standby; every time we change an inefficient light bulb for an energy-saving one; every time we don't leave our mobile phone chargers plugged in when the power is not switched off... and so on. We can remember the environment at many points every day.
My fourth and final thought. WED is a campaign to "empower people to become active agents of sustainable and equitable development". A positive framework I support: the everyday actions of each individual can produce social change. But we are at a point where it is the actions of people who influence the provision of services that will be the most pivotal in directing global change. It is the provision of additional public services that will enhance people's capacities to care for their own environment. As such, I am sceptical of a multi-state sponsored campaign that emphasises the responsibilities of people rather than people in organisations that can effect change.
The EU's You Control Climate Change campaign runs into similar problems, though their website is excellent in terms of informative advice about what you can do.
The campaign to prevent further climate change is a global project that connects each and every one of us. We are witnessing a moment in history where the force of those connections among every photosynthesising and food-digesting living thing is more complex and fast changing than ever before. The environment is what sustains us; for things to change, we have to stop thinking about that fact as if it belongs to some obscure hippy ideology. And when I say "we", I am less interested in you and I than I am in certain governments whose positions of influence come to represent us all. What is conjured by "the environment" is the fact that we all live within an ecosystem that is not apart from us, yet that we do not inhabit in equal ways.
Perhaps then, World Environment Day presents us with an opportunity to remember that.
Little known facts about climate change
The earth has warmed by approximately 0.75°C since pre-industrial times. Eleven of the warmest years in the past 125 years occurred since 1990, with 2005 the warmest on record. There is overwhelming consensus that this is due to emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), from burning fossil fuels.
Examination of ice cores shows there is more CO2 in the atmosphere than at any time in the past 600,000 years. Between 1960 and 2002, annual anthropogenic global emissions of CO2 approximately tripled. They rose by about 33 per cent since 1987 alone.
Warming in this century is projected to be between 1.4°C and 5.8°C. The impacts of climate change are already visible. Examples include: the shrinking Arctic ice cap; accelerating sea level rise; receding glaciers worldwide; thawing permafrost; earlier break-up of river and lake ice; increasing intensity and duration of tropical storms; lengthening of mid- to high-latitude growing seasons; and shifts in plant and animal ranges and behaviour.
In the Arctic, as peat bogs thaw they are releasing methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Scientists are increasingly concerned about the possibility of abrupt climate change, including reductions in ocean currents, such as the Gulf Stream which warms Europe, and changed patterns of rainfall, such as the monsoon seasons, which would affect food security for billions of people.
20070602-lifestyle--cover2.jpgAsk a polar bear...
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average. The area of the Arctic Ocean covered by ice each summer has been shrinking, and the remaining ice is becoming less thick. Because more heat is absorbed by the sea than by ice, a feedback is created which results in further melting.
Polar bears depend on sea ice, where they hunt seals and use ice corridors to move from one area to another. Pregnant females build winter dens in areas with thick snow cover. They have not eaten for five to seven months when they emerge with their cubs in the spring. They need good spring sea-ice conditions for their own and their cubs' survival.
Some climate models project there may be an almost complete loss of summer sea-ice in the Arctic before the end of the century. If this happens, polar bears are unlikely to survive as a species.
Ask a farmer...
Although crop yields may increase in some areas due to climate change, the negative effects are likely to dominate as warming increases. Africa is especially vulnerable, and studies warn there may be a significant increase in hunger.
Poor communities are most directly dependent for their livelihoods on a stable and hospitable climate. They often rely on rain-fed subsistence agriculture, and are deeply dependent on climatic phenomena, such as the Asian monsoons. They are also most vulnerable to extreme weather events such as droughts and tropical storms.
As glaciers melt in the world's great mountain ranges, water supplies to rivers will be affected. In Europe, eight out of nine glaciated regions show significant retreat.
Between 1850 and 1980, glaciers in the European Alps lost approximately one-third of their area and one-half of their mass.
Ask an islander...
In the past 100 years, global sea level rose between one and two millimetres a year. Since 1992 the rate has increased to about three millimetres a year, primarily through thermal expansion of warming oceans and freshwater flowing into the oceans from melting ice.
Melting ice is responsible for a significant portion of the observed sea level rise, with the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets the largest contributors. The Greenland Ice Sheet is melting faster than new ice is being formed. In the Antarctic, three large sections of ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula have collapsed over the past 11 years, followed by a marked acceleration and thinning of glaciers that were held back by the shelves.
As sea levels rise, inhabitants of low-lying islands and coastal cities face inundation.
Ask an insurer...
In 2005 the Munich Re Foundation estimated economic losses due to weather-linked disasters, such as tropical storms and forest fires, at more than $200 billion, with insured losses at more than $70 billion. This compares with 2004, the previous most costly year, when economic losses totalled around $145 billion and insured losses reached some $45 billion.
Continued global warming is expected to cause shifts in the geographic range (latitude and altitude) and seasonality of certain infectious diseases, including vector-borne infections such as malaria and dengue fever, and food-borne infections, such as salmonellosis, which peak in the warmer months.
Some health impacts may be beneficial. For example, milder winters may reduce the seasonal winter-time peak in deaths in temperate countries.
Ask yourself...
There are many options available to avoid catastrophic climate change. These include worldwide improvements in energy efficiency and a shift to low-carbon and renewable resources such as solar and wind power, bio-energy and geothermal energy. There is also potential for capturing and storing CO2, while a number of analysts consider that nuclear power could play a significant role,
The Global Wind Energy Council estimates that over a third of the world's electricity could be generated by wind by 2050.
A low-greenhouse gas future will also need to include social changes.
From Vietnam to Australia, Kenya to Mexico, people are banding together to plant trees. Trees can slow climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide as they grow. They also help to reduce pollution, keep cities cool, protect water catchments and reduce soil erosion.
• Ms Cefai is doing her PhD in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.