Development vs Environment

7/29/2019 Development vs Environment

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DEVELOPMENT Vs ENVIRONMENT

Washington: If deterioration of the global environment over the past several decades is anyguide, the coming century does not hold out much promise for reversing these trends, manyenvironmentalists are warning as the millennium comes to a close.

Rising Earth temperatures, record losses in biodiversity and species extinction, increasing

demands and dwindling supplies of fresh water, only seem to be getting worse.

On the up-side, the past several decades has seen citizens and environmental groups, or non-governmental organisations (NGOs), worldwide pulling together in unprecedentednumbers to pressure governments to pass laws to protect the ozone layer, ban toxicchemicals in the environment, reduce air and water pollution, and protect endangeredspecies and habitats.

Seeking a balance between economic development and environmental protection, NGOshave played a major role in shaping international environmental treaties, including the UNConvention on Biological Diversity, the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, and the Basel

Convention, which bans exporting hazardous wastes from industrialised nations todeveloping countries. Yet as the millennium pulls to a close, the political and financialstructure of the world economy, which has become increasingly dominated by powerfulmultinational corporations, is directly at odds with efforts to promote a healthy Earth.

One clear example of this, has been the success of powerful multinational oil and gasindustries in swaying the US Senate against ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on climatechange, an international treaty seeking to reduce emissions of heat-trapping 'greenhouse'gases.

Scientists believe that such emissions, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, will warm the

Earth and result in drastic climate change, including increasing the intensity and frequencyof floods, droughts, and storms.

If current record-breaking warming trends continue, average global temperatures could rise between 1 and 3.5 degrees centigrade by the year 2050, according to expert studies.

'The challenge in the 21st century is to replace the corporate-dominated paradigm thatworships the bottom-line with a framework that puts the environment, human rights, andlabour rights first.

In the past several decades, NGOs have applied a diverse array of strategies to counter

corporate power including promoting laws to protect the environment, developing lawsuitsagainst governments and corporations, and passing company shareholder resolutions.

Citizens in Ecuador, who see their own country's court systems as inadequate, for example,have been attempting to hold US oil giant Texaco accountable for its past operations, bysuing the company in US courts. Similar suits have been filed in the US court systemagainst UNOCAL and Chevron for their activities abroad.



While praising these efforts, Peter Montague, director of the Maryland-basedEnvironmental Research Foundation, says the environmental movement must pay closer attention to how the push for trade liberalisation is eroding the power of nation-states.

'NGOs will become irrelevant if national governments lose their capacity to govern because power has been transferred to international trade bodies,' he says.

After the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, aUS firm complained that it had been illegally prevented from opening a waste disposal plant because of environmental zoning laws in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi.

Through NAFTA, Metalclad corporation sought some $90 million in damages since it saidstate authorities were - against trade rules - prohibiting it from making a profit since theydeclared the site an ecological zone and refused to allow the firm to reopen the facility.

Similarly, many domestic environmental regulations - which NGOs have worked very hardto pass into law - have been challenged through the World Trade Organisation (WTO) andhence weakened or abolished, warn environmentalists.

The United States, for instance, gutted provisions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act,the Clean Air Act, and its Endangered Species Act after these environmental policies werechallenged before the WTO, according to a recent report released by Public Citizen, aWashington-based NGO founded by consumer advocate Ralph Nader.

'This undemocratic trend must be reversed and power must be returned to governments,'says Montague.

Citizen groups and environmental organisations have been trying to guide global trade by pressuring governments to attach environmental provisions to trade agreements and

pressure international financial institutions like the World Bank, to adopt minimalenvironmental and social standards for funding projects.

'In terms of reforms at the World Bank, I would say, depending on how you look at it, theglass is half empty or half full,' says Bruce Rich, senior attorney for the EnvironmentalDefense Fund.

While many destructive projects will not be funded by the Bank since environmentalistslike Rich pressured the institution to adopt minimal guidelines, the Bank is still a largecentralised institution which favours large loans - which often go toward largecontroversial energy projects, he says. Some investment projects funded by global financial

institutions 'are what is fuelling climate change and losses in biodiversity', says Rich.

Using lessons from studying these institutions, environmental groups, including Indonesia- based Bioforum and Friends of the Earth Japan, have begun a new campaign to reform public export-credit lending agencies which operate without social and environmentalstandards.

Designed to help a nation's firms compete for business abroad, these agencies provide publicly backed loans, guarantees and insurance to corporations seeking to do business indeveloping countries. 'These agencies are often financing projects - many riddled with



corruption - that other taxpayer-supported agencies like the World Bank reject asenvironmentally and economically unsustainable,' says Rich.

Another challenge in the coming decades is genetic modification and environmentalists saythey will keep a close watch on companies such as Novartis and Monsanto, which areheavily pushing their new technological innovations in biological engineering.

'We are in the midst of a radical, historic transition - from the Industrial Age to theBiotechnical Age,' says Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Washington-based Foundation onEconomic Trends in his book, The Biotech Century.

Environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists, worrythat the mass release of thousands of genetically engineered crops into the environment willcause 'super-weeds' through unintentional cross-breeding and hence irreversible damage tothe Earth. Mass extinction of plant, animal and insect species will also be a trendenvironmentalists hope to reverse.

John Tuxill, a researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, says that as critical habitat is logged

or developed, extinction rates have accelerated this century to at least 1,000 species per year. 'These numbers indicate we now live in a time of mass extinction - a globalevolutionary upheaval in the diversity and composition of life,' he says.

'What we need now is a rapid shift in consciousness, a dawning awareness in peopleeverywhere that we have to shift quickly to a sustainable economy if we want to avoiddamaging our natural support systems beyond repair,' says the Institute's founder Lester Brown.

Danny Kennedy, director of Project Underground, the California-based internationalmining watchdog, says for such a shift to happen, environmental organisations need to

focus on organising people at the community level and working closely with other socialmovements, such as the human rights and civil rights movements.

'The power of civil disobedience and mass movements has been harnessed and thenforgotten at different points in the century,' he says. But the huge upcoming challenge, addsKarliner, will be to ensure that discontent with corporate-led globalisation is not captured by nationalist xenophobic responses such as the rise of right-wing militia groups in theUnited States, India's BJP party or France's Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Instead, environmental and related movements need to work hard to harness the discontentwith corporate power to promote democratic responses that value human rights and multi-

racial and multi-ethnic responses to solving the problems.

'We need to take the lessons learned from some of the horrors of the 20th century and applythem to building an alternative to globalisation in the 21st century,' says Karliner.Otherwise, he says, we may repeat some of the past centuries' more profound mistakes. -Third World Network Features/IPS

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Development vs Environment