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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory.
I have grown tired of frustration and lament. Too often in these musing have I referred to the lack of progress in ocean sustainability action, quoted the UN Secretary General’s characterization of the world’s response to the challenge of climate change as “too little, too late.” Today, I will offer two counter-initiatives, proposed by government—for governance—at the international and state level – two powerful opportunities for breakthrough and progress.
The first is “Bridgetown 2.0, an urgent and decisive action to reform the international financial architecture,” a plan devised and promoted by Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, leader of a small island nation, but a powerful, imaginative force for invention at the United Nations, a voice that demands attention. The plan envelops much of the policy and actions previously articulated by the international community, but addresses the challenge of investment and liquidity support for suggested solutions. Specifically, it urges UN member states and agencies to fast-track drawing rights for $100 billion to be invested in poverty reduction and growth, resiliency and sustainability; to restore access to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) resources limited during the pandemic; to create a redesigned framework for the G20 nations to accelerate and/or restructure debt relief; to refinance natural disaster response and mitigation, reducing interest and adding credit guarantees and extended maturities; to mobilize private sector investment of over $15 trillion per year for green and just transformations; to expand project preparation, risk reduction instruments, blended finance to strengthen viability and development of climate projects; to streamline and harmonize procedures, assure supply chains, trading systems, and more–essentially a coherent, ambitious finance-driven program to reform governance, financial institutions, and trading systems to enable access to liquidity, debt sustainability, private capital, and equitable distribution for a program of climate-change response and implementation. It’s big and complicated, but it is a simplifying focus and may have some increased probability of success, incremental and otherwise, given the determination of Ms. Mottley and her allies.
The second project is the commitment by the State of California to 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045, a date that seems very far away, but closer every day without such ambitious climate action. California is the most progressive state in the United States with a political arrangement and proven commitment to environmental protection and action. It has already experienced the negative impact of sea-level rise, extreme weather, flash-flooding, erosion, and wildfire. The plan requires multi-dimensional response and massive investment: in multiple forms of alternative energy production, emission reduction, radical re-design and reconstruction of the electrical distribution grid, shift to electric vehicles for all modes of transport, battery efficiency and other methods for storage capacity to adequate scale and increasing demand, public investment, regulatory enhancement, subsidy and tax incentive, mobilized private capital, and consistent, emphatic civic commitment, political will, and leadership. With an economy larger than many nation states, the California example is fraught with implication and motivation to succeed, fraught with the equal opportunity to fail.
We are all participants in these projects, whether or not directly involved. Behind both of these examples there are individuals: a prime minister, a state governor, a bureaucracy, a planning agency, a collective of public and private financing entities, political opposition, denial and complacency, fear of change, discouragement at the complexity and technicality of it all. Behind both are a rejection of complacency, short-term vested interest, and ideological barriers that preclude innovation even at the risk of personal, local, national, and international survival. During the last year, almost every place on Earth, from glacier to desert, worldwide, has experienced some destructive manifestation of climate change. The ice melts. The ocean warms. The forests burn. The water disappears. Who has not borne witness to these events, first-hand or through reports distributed through global communications? Who then cannot understand, and support, a way toward solution? Two steps forward are essential. We cannot afford to stay in place, or worse, to take two steps backward We are all participants; will we be victims? Or heroines and heroes? Do we have any choice?
We will disuss these issues and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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