Articles by Geoff Dabelko

Get your assessment

Get a sneak peek at the massive Millennium Ecosystem Assessment before its official launch on March 30 in nine cities around the world. Billed as the most comprehensive assessment ever of the world's ecosystems and the impacts of those ecosystems on human health, the four-year study was written by 1,300 experts from 95 countries with another 900 serving as editors and reviewers. The hope is that like the consensus-driven Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the pains taken at inclusive and comprehensive scientific assessment will bring more political as well as scientific heft to the conclusions.  With the report embargoed until its release March 30, it is hard to say more. But there is something for everyone in this effort.

Don’t know much about history…

Just how did we get to this holding pattern on multilateral environmental agreements? What are the political roots of today's international sustainability debates? Didn't attempts to integrate environment and development start with the Brundtland Commission's 1987 Our Common Future?

A new working paper from Harvard's Center for International Development takes the long view and provides critical historical context needed for understanding today's current state of affairs. In "The Quest for Global Sustainability: International Efforts on Linking Environment and Development," scholars Henrik Selin and Bjorn-Ola Linner analyze policy attempts to integrate environment and development in the post-World War II period up until the 1992 Earth Summit. They convincingly maintain that too many of today's sustainability debates occur in an ahistorical vacuum unaware of these earlier efforts.

One take-home message of their investigation is the need for greater recognition of just how much North-South politics drive (or derail) these processes.  As we focus considerable (and needed) attention on the poor health of the transatlantic environmental relationship, we must also keep our eyes on the larger prize (and frankly more difficult gap to bridge) of North-South environmental relations.

Not so black and white on Kyoto

This BBC story on the French love affair with nuclear power makes the somewhat surprising point that even with 78% of its power generated by its 58 nuclear plants, France is not on pace to meet its 2008 greenhouse gas emissions reductions as mandated by the Kyoto Protocol. In fact, only the U.K. and Sweden among E.U. signatories are on target to meet the 8% reduction in emmissions by 2010.

This unsettling situation makes at least two things quite clear:

1. Transport (not fueled by nuclear power) must be responsible for a very large portion of greenhouse emissions;
2. the Europeans are in danger of their words speaking louder than their actions when it comes to meeting the reductions mandated by Kyoto.

It is no excuse for American inaction, but failure to meet these commitments may have the effect of undermining the case for the multilateral environmental mechanism while reinforcing the image of Europeans as aspirational rather than serious about meeting targets and timetables.    

Avoiding “dangerous” climate change

Well, if precise scientific terms haven't worked to dramatize the potential impact of climate change, perhaps imprecise, scary-sounding ones will. The U.K. government kicked off Tony Blair's promised climate science conference today with a call to avoid "dangerous climate change." All could agree it is to be avoided. Agreeing on a definition of "dangerous" is perhaps another matter.

This conference, held at the leading Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, England, is part of the lead-up to Blair pushing climate change as he hosts the upcoming G8 summit. The U.S. government is a key target audience. When pushed to provide evidence of any budging in the U.S. position, U.K. Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett offered no examples, according to this BBC story. See also Andrew Revkin in The New York Times on the Exeter Conference.