Ecosystems – Not an Election Issue

Sustainability questions have hardly featured at all in the course of the British general election campaign. Although many Conservative candidates deny the existence of climate change, no-one high-profile has spoken up for that view, and therefore climate has not been an issue in the campaign.

However, climate is on the political agenda these days in other ways, and will be whoever wins the election. But what is not on the agenda at all, either in elections or in between elections, never on the agenda in fact, at least in the UK – and it would be interesting to hear if there are any exceptions anywhere in Europe – is the state of the world’s ecosystems.

In 2005, the most thorough survey ever carried out on the state of the planet, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, reported deterioration in most of the world’s ecosystems. More recently, in 2009 and 2010, articles in the scientific journal ‘Nature’, ‘Scientific American’, and the UK magazine ‘New Scientist’, have put forward the “planetary boundaries” analysis, showing that climate change is only one of a set of nine different major trends that threaten the future of our global environment.

But none of this has become a political issue. Although we are used to it being like this, it would be wrong to lose a sense of how strange it is. If we were observing creatures on some other planet, busily destroying the underpinnings and preconditions for their lives, we would think they were engaged in a set of irrational activities and we would regard them as unintelligent beings. That analysis of course applies to our own species.
However three key ingredients are in place to move ahead on this problem politically and make it possible to do something about it –

(1) The problem is well-researched and there is plenty of evidence.

(2) There are the makings of a coalition of people with good, though very different, reasons to address this issue – people who are concerned about nature and biodiversity for its own sake; people in poorer countries who depend for a living on the resources around them; and businesses which need a continuing supply of the resources and processes they depend on to continue producing their products.

(3) There is a political process. This October, in Nagoya, Japan, there will be the Conference of the Parties – a gathering of all the governments which signed up – to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the equivalent of what the Copenhagen conference was for the Climate Change Convention (the two conventions were signed in the same week, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992). Copenhagen failed – but there is time to build attention and support for Nagoya.

A key issue in all of this is breaking out of the mindset that the services of the natural world – fertile soil, pollination, clean and abundant water, oceans which are not too acid, a climate within reasonable bounds, etc. – all come for free. In fact, they are going to have to be paid for, in order to outbid the amounts of money forthcoming for other – competing – uses of the same land and water, for example for logging and mining.

That is going to imply a further call on public expenditure at a time of cutbacks, and it is tempting for politicians to want to forget about it. That attitude runs risks far greater than those which were run by the authorities which failed in the past few decades in their duty to properly regulate international finance. An ecological collapse would be far more devastating in its consequences than any financial collapse.

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