We all know
Steffen, W. Who's "et al. (2015)"?
Of all the authors of the
2015 paper, 9 are men and 7 are women, a satisfactorily even representation. What about other forms of representation? Except for
Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan, all are (at least partly) caucasian. Except for Ramanathan, researchers representing organisations in developing countries (LDCs) like Kenya and South Africa hold joint appointments with organisations in Europe. Even Ramanathan is representing both India, an LDC, and United States, a developed country (DC).
Not to go all
intersectional feminist and criticise good research for feminism's sake, but it's worth noting that DC representation exceedingly outnumbers LDC representation in this paper. This gives the impression that PBs is an initiative of the Global North.
Debates on
global environmental governance are a privilege of the secure, wealthy and powerful.
Professor Juan MartÃnez‐Alier quotes Hugo Blanco, a former peasant leader in Peru,
"The common people have more important things to think about, for instance how to get their daily bread."
However, with great power comes great responsibility. In a survey in Germany on the
perceived levels of pressure to act on water management issues and air pollution control, global pressures were rated significantly higher than local pressures. Secure, wealthy and powerful states - DCs - are not only privileged enough to take up global environmental causes, they are apparently burdened with the responsibility to. This is no surprise, since from the perspective of
Environmental Justice, many consider
DCs to have an ecological debt to LDCs.
From a policy perspective, LDCs have poorer infrastructure to
ensure compliance with environmental regulations than DCs do. There is a tendency for DCs to export environmental degradation to LDCs.
There are different varieties (and theories) of
environmentalism. Here, I'm pointing out the difference between the
environmentalism of affluence and the
environmentalism of survival. Hugo Blanco's speech went on to
list valiant environmentalists fighting against
local pollution and
exploitation problems;
"Indigenous peoples oppose deforestation; northern environmentalists may complain against deforestation only if they reduce CO2 in their own countries."
Thus, one valid criticism of the PBs, developed to influence global environmental governance, is that it has less relevance on local scales, especially in LDCs, where resource exploitation and environmental degradation have priority over the less urgent global environmental changes.
Although the importance of
local environmental governance cannot be underestimated, global efforts are just as important to furthering
Environmental Justice. LDCs are the
most vulnerable to security consequences of climate change.
Coastal communities in LDCs are
most vulnerable to rising sea levels.
In addition, assuming that "environmental conflicts" fall into the "established patterns of interstate conflict", and convening on national scales to "mobilise environmental awareness and action,
may prove counterproductive by undermining globalist political sensibility". Exacerbating the North-South divide in the name of justice is not the most sustainable strategy for decision-makers to build sustainability.
While LDCs more often than not have to prioritise local over global problems, all environmental issues are interconnected - even the 9 PBs interact - because
"Earth is a single, complex, integrated system". I believe that the planetary perspective of PBs unite humanity in a way that environmental concepts with a narrower focus cannot achieve. With this mindset, world leaders would look upon the environmental degradation of a remote region not as
a faraway problem, but as inseparable from the Earth System.
However, as with everything, moderation is key. It has been shown that in the case of Climate Change,
a fragmented, loosely-coupled set of specific regimes has advantages over a comprehensive, integrated, global regime. The importance of
local environmental governance is further supported by evidence that "agents make decisions based on individual perceptions". Earth System scientists abstractly debating planetary-scale processes is not the only meaningful conversation we should be having about global environmental change. We should encourage people to share their individual stories about environmental change, too.
Personally, I've noticed that more and more open green spaces in Singapore are being converted to buildings. I've read about the Three Gorges Dam and other environmentally invasive initiatives happening in China during my lifetime. I've vacationed on Southeast Asian tropical islands, and watched our speedboat cut corals. These instances of land-use change concern me; I don't need science to be convinced. The PBs simply put them all into perspective.
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