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Anchored in the past, by the people who control the present, with a future that is looking increasingly bleak

March 26, 2023 Melanie Hawken

by Lionesses of Africa Operations Department

If proof that the world was changing for the worse, proof that Climate Change is real, and proof that it was accelerating away from us was ever needed, we got a loadful this week.

Hot on the heals of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change that involved literally hundreds of scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages, all boiled down to one message: act now, or it will be too late, the World Economic Forum published their new Global Risks Report. Always a fun late-night read. You thought current conditions were bad, we ain’t seen nothing yet!

The WEF’s introduction sets the stage: “The world faces a set of risks that feel both wholly new and eerily familiar…As we stand on the edge of a low-growth and low-cooperation era, tougher trade-offs risk eroding climate action, human development and future resilience.” (here), they then highlight “…the multiple areas where the world is at a critical inflection point” within the next 2 years and then 10.

Under 2 years:

  • Cost-of-living crisis

  • Natural disasters and extreme weather events

  • Geo-economic confrontation

  • Failure to mitigate climate change

  • Erosion of social cohesion and societal polarization

  • Large-scale environmental damage incidents

  • Failure of climate change adaptation

  • Widespread cybercrime and cyber insecurity

  • Natural resource crises

  • Large-scale involuntary migration

10 years?

  • Failure to mitigate climate change

  • Failure of climate-change adaptation

  • Natural disasters and extreme weather events

  • Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse

  • Large-scale involuntary migration

  • Natural resource crises

  • Erosion of social cohesion and societal polarization

  • Widespread cybercrime and cyber insecurity

  • Geoeconomic confrontation

  • Large-scale environmental damage incidents

Not a nice list to wake up to, especially if you live in low lying areas of Lagos, or as we are tragically seeing currently, the central and very low lying areas of Mozambique and Malawi, you certainly have the proof on your doorstep.

The IPCC also did not mince their words this time, and given the amount of climate related and created problems in the WEF’s list, we are not surprised.

In fairness, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that announcing that a country or company would reach ‘net-zero’ by 2050 was a ‘COP-out’ and this was confirmed when the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres no less, stated that countries had to do better and bring forward their ‘net zero’ plans to 2040, He was clearly agreeing with our comments back in August 2022 (here) - who knew he was a Lioness Weekender subscriber!

The report states clearly and rather gloomily: “Adaptation options that are feasible and effective today will become constrained and less effective with increasing global warming.” - ergo: time is running out fast.

Sadly as the WEF show, it’s not just climate that is in the midst of a crisis, but many other areas. The UN set up the 8 Millennium Development Goals in 2000 which changed to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, but the progress on these is not only slow, but in many cases heading backwards.

SDG 13 is about creating climate action, but that is not the only SDG that is in crisis. The UN’s own review of their progress towards meeting the SDGs show the first 8 are a long way from any form of success, SDG10 (reduced inequalities) is questionable. We would argue that 11 and 12 are failing. Life below water and on land, 12 and 13 are clearly in trouble. We would politely suggest that SDG 16 (Peace, justice and strong institutions) has failed - is it unfair to wonder where the UN was when Putin invaded the Ukraine, to say nothing of the other many horrific conflicts around the globe recently - its own charter states: “The Purposes of the United Nations are: To maintain international peace and security…”, these are the opening lines.

Given that Covid 19 was mentioned numerous times to explain the lack of forward momentum towards 2030, we looked back at the 2019 report (here), where once again we have António Guterres: “It is abundantly clear that a much deeper, faster and more ambitious response is needed to unleash the social and economic transformation needed to achieve our 2030 goals.”

The introduction written by Liu Zhenmin, states “There is still time for us to achieve the SDGs if we act now and act together…”

Together…

In a polarised world with many crises hitting us, the chances of reaching the SDGs by 2030 is moving further out of our reach day by day, although the UN give some hope in their film (here) directed by the one and only Richard Curtis (he of ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ and other great heart-tugging films). They open with the fabulous actor Thandie Newton who says that the world has never had to face challenges as we do now “…but together we can overcome them.”

Together…

But have we truly been together? Or is this all just talk? George Orwell, in ‘1984’ wrote 'Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.’ One has to say the future since he wrote those words has not been impressive, indeed, whilst we are on a literary run one could argue that much of the world since his time has been run by those that “know[s] the price of everything and the value of nothing’, as Oscar Wilde wrote (almost 100 years earlier) in his play ‘Lady Windemere’s Fan’, could this be at the heart of the problem?

Surely not, we hear you say. But if we are to move forward to face and overcome this ‘polycrisis’ we need ‘we’, and that includes women and women are kept out of so much, such as trade.

“International trade is a male monopoly. 99 per cent of trade and 99 per cent of procurement contracts, whether from governments or companies, are controlled by men”, as an article by Linda Scott in the Financial Times (here) shows, and “[u]niquely gendered structural mechanisms enforce the disparities across the whole world system.”

This brings us nicely back to our ‘Word of the Women’s Month 2023’, namely ‘Homophily’, ‘the love of ones own’, as discussed in our 3-part look at the lack of financing for women (here). As the FT says, this lack of finance is a serious problem for moving women’s businesses forward: "To win a large contract…a supplier must reliably produce large volumes that meet quality and safety standards. This takes capital — women typically have little access to this resource…Women’s limited control over capital is…rooted in a worldwide structural exclusion. For 4,000 years, females have been forbidden, usually by law, from owning land. This exclusion has been so powerful that men now own more than 80 per cent of the world’s surface. Men have rolled up their near-monopoly on land to a near-monopoly on capital — and virtually total control over trade.”

The article continues: “A mushrooming number of studies — large-scale statistical analyses and rigorous scientific investigations — further show that this lopsidedness reduces GDP significantly, while perpetuating poverty, hunger, slavery, and violence of all kinds, as well as geopolitical and economic instability.” Change this and so much changes for the better, that is why SDG5, along with SDG13-Climate are so pivotal for the globe.

There is a great deal of talk about ‘together’, about ‘we’, as if after 23 years of effort by the UN, the ball is being handed to ‘us’. But until the UN and also Governments that provide the UN Budget and all their offices and countless organisations, banks and funds they support, create real gender equality, even if they have to hold back investment until it happens and the proof is handed over - why not? Otherwise, how can we move forward? Talking and hoping has not got us to where we should or need to be, instead we seem to be firmly anchored in the past, by the people who control the present with a future that is looking increasingly bleak.

“Gender equality is growing more distant. On the current track, UN Women puts it 300 years away,” António Guterres again (here).

Wow. That’s bleak.

Stay safe.

In Team Lioness Tags SDGs
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