The sessions of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change are increasingly similar to the good brandy of arbutus: they hit hard at the time, but then leave no hangovers.
Which, in this case, is bad.
See the recently completed COP 23 in the German city of Bonn. It had everything to be historic: held in the heart of the economic and political system of industrialized Europe, with the unprecedented participation of a Pacific archipelago, the Fiji Islands – threatened by rising sea levels and which, moreover, presided over the work – and with the main Western power, the United States of America, in a cycle of rupture with international commitments.
A test by fire, therefore. However, has anyone heard of any results?
In this session, in which the agenda sought the best and most effective mechanisms to implement the fragile decisions of the Paris Agreement, signed in 2015, an affirmation of confidence and a demonstration of competence and solidarity on the part of the international community were needed.
And not because of the USA – the American delegation participated in it and worked with the same attitude as in previous years, along with the specific delegation to contest Trump's decision, the “We are still in” – but because it really is urgent to act .
Even so, the industrialized countries, precisely 20 years after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, where targets were established for the reduction of the atmospheric concentration of gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect (revised in 2012, through the Doha Amendment), seem to having forgotten the commitment to the goals set for 2020, now looking to the horizon of 2030 and waving the “carrot” of abandoning coal.
This sends a message, especially to the so-called developing countries, that the given and written word has no value after all, and that the main broadcasters are not so committed to this issue, always pushing it with their bellies. The size of the carrot does not matter then, as rabbits are aware that it is always false…
It not only breaks the commitment and the sense of common and shared effort, but, worst of all, it sends the message to all the citizens of the world that, clearly, we cannot count on the current decision-makers to solve this problem.
Because, despite the reported progress of Humanity, we are not able to look at it as a whole in solidarity. Because in today's ruling elites there is no intellectual, state or simply human dimension to be able to see what is really important. Seeing that, far above the effabulations, scams and games of economics, there is only the survival of the human species in conditions of dignity. And that the others are us too.
Because that's what it's about, it never hurts to remember. We are not on the brink of any planetary cataclysm, any global ecosystem collapse. The planet was once a ball of fire, and from then on it spawned life. It has already gone through much more complicated periods climatically, it has generated and extinguished species much larger than us. It will survive, it will rebalance itself, it will reinvent itself, it will prosper.
It remains to be seen whether we are part of that process or whether we jump overboard, however. Because the risk we run is that of damage, eventually irreversible on a human temporal scale, to the conditions of life we have as pleasant and healthy, and conducive to a balanced development of our activities. Geographical reorganization in order to adapt to new realities will always be possible, but there, surely, on the basis of incalculable wars and human tragedies. Just look at the Mediterranean.
The attitude of the world's “leaders” – aren't they just chiefs? – is almost reminiscent of Ricardo Araújo Pereira's scribble about the position taken by the then commentator Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa in the referendum on the decriminalization of abortion: “Is it a vital issue for the health of the planet from the perspective of human life? IT'S. So are we putting it at the center of our priorities and doing everything we can? No. And do we tolerate it? Yes".
A prime example was the most recent edition of the “Pros and Cons” program which, regarding the drought, also addressed the issue of climate change. In it, the mayor of Loulé, in a participation from the audience, got right in a dusty way on all the buzzwords, from mitigation to adaptation.
Asked to explain a concrete measure that was part of the Municipal Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change of Loulé, he was unable. The best he could was to explain that some measures lead to the contracting of programs, which will then lead to actions.
This happens not because of a lack of sensitivity or competence, which it certainly has, or because it does not implement any measures – some in the field for all to see, such as in terms of energy – but because the priority of the topic is exhausted in the speech.
It has no place in the effective dynamics that dominate the political party exercise today. On the contrary, the implementation of a new attitude towards the phenomenon of climate change and its main driving forces implies the collapse, by substitution, of the economic and financial system that finances, feeds and supports the current political system and its worldview.
That leaves us, citizens, voters, consumers, nobody, to make use of what is ours, and demand change, promoting it immediately in our habits. Or bear the consequences.
Also in Bonn, but in 1789 (curiously the year of the French Revolution and the approval of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen), Peter Joseph Lenné was born, a distinguished landscape architect, whose gardens are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The man was so important that his name is now perpetuated through an award, in what is considered the world's largest competition of ideas in terms of landscape architecture, covering the design of open spaces ranging from gardens to regions.
And we, in our time, what legacy will we leave, and what will they say about us in 200 or so years?
Author Gonçalo Gomes is a landscape architect, president of the Algarve Regional Section of the Portuguese Association of Landscape Architects (APAP)
(and writes according to the old Spelling Agreement)
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