How Do We Stop Countries Disappearing
Transcriber: Marcela Lodi
Reviewer: Eunice Tan
Hello, I’m Rory Welsh.
Thank you for joining me.
Imagine an island.
This island is very small.
You can stand anywhere on it
and see the vast ocean on one side
and a shallow lagoon on the other.
Encircling this lagoon
are a series of similar islands.
Collectively, these islands
form your nation.
You live cooperatively,
as you have done for thousands of years.
It is a safe, harmonious place
with few luxuries,
but what there is sustains everyone.
You get few visitors,
but those that do come are welcomed
with warm, local, genuine hospitality.
Recently, however,
you notice the tide rising higher,
the ground shrinking beneath your feet.
Fewer and fewer of your crops yield food.
The skies that once
brought you healing rains
now bring punishing onslaughts.
A distinct feeling hangs in the humid air
that your way of life
may no longer be possible,
that your home may soon exist
only in memories like these.
Welcome to Tuvalu.
For those of you who haven’t heard of it -
and don’t worry,
no one I mention it to has -
Tuvalu is a small
island nation in the Pacific,
about 700 miles north of Fiji.
Its highest point isn’t even
five metres above sea level,
which means that, based on
current sea-level projections,
it will be underwater
in the next 50 to 100 years.
Locals fear it might be sooner.
Long before that happens,
Tuvaluans face an uphill struggle to adapt
their daily lives to the changing climate.
They’re fighting
the rising tide, quite literally.
If there’s one word to describe Tuvalu,
it’s ‘vulnerable’.
In both environmental and economic terms,
it’s in a precarious position.
It’s highly dependent upon grants
from international benefactors
and on income from the Tuvalu Trust Fund.
Much of its money comes from licensing -
both from fishing
and from its rather fortunate
national web domain suffix, ‘.tv’.
Lack of economic opportunity on the island
forces many Tuvaluans
to pursue hospitality
or agriculture-based work programmes
in New Zealand or Australia,
sending remittances home.
It’s also still common
to work on foreign ships
in order to send money home.
There’s little industry
or agriculture on the islands,
and there’s even less opportunity
for those who’ve earned degrees abroad
to pursue graduate jobs.
Because it is so small, so remote
and so lacking in resources,
the opportunities to expand
its economy are incredibly limited.
This all goes some way to explaining
why the UN has designated Tuvalu
a ‘least developed country’.
These economic considerations
have a direct impact
upon the day-to-day lives of Tuvaluans.
Everything must be shipped via Fiji,
entailing high shipping costs,
making goods very expensive.
Long shipping times mean
that there’s little fresh food available
and that everything must be packaged.
As you might see from some of my slides,
an influx of non-biodegradable plastics
has led to a build-up of landfill waste
on some of the islands.
This, compounded
by the endemic lack of space,
affects all aspects of life.
Linked to all of these issues
are Tuvalu’s pressing ecological concerns.
Their inhabitable land is eroding
about as quickly as my hairline,
meaning that people are moving
towards population centres
to be closer to resources
and infrastructure.
This puts an even greater strain
on already scarce natural resources.
By unintended consequence,
it also creates another
point of vulnerability.
Tuvalu is vulnerable to tropical cyclones.
And whilst these are rare,
the concentration of people
and resources into a particular area
increases the risk
to the country as a whole
as well as that area in particular.
It would be the difference in impact
between a hurricane hitting London
rather than the Cotswolds.
But here we find a big difference.
The idea of a major weather event
devastating Britain is unthinkable.
We would take any necessary measure
to prevent it from even being
a possibility, wouldn’t we?
The difference is we can.
Tuvalu can’t.
Because of its small population
and its lack of economic power,
Tuvalu holds no sway
over international environmental policy.
And even if it did, it would have
no means by which it can enforce it.
It relies on international organisations,
namely the UN, to do that on its behalf.
And herein the problem lies.
The UN has singularly failed to protect
the interests of countries like Tuvalu
in its environmental policy.
And this isn’t just happenstance;
it’s structural.
Much as there are five countries
that have permanent right of veto
in the UN Security Council,
there are a small number
of powerful countries
that wield de facto power
over its environmental decisions.
To put it in other terms,
Tuvalu is feeling the effects
of decisions that it had no say in.
The countries with the most influence
over UN environmental policy
are also the biggest contributors
of greenhouse gases.
This is a widely known fact,
but the implications
are rarely thought through.
The wealth of these countries
insulates them to a large degree
against the effects of climate change.
They can reposition population centres,
they can build infrastructure
to protect against natural disasters,
and they have enough
basic amenities to distribute.
This also points
to a basic developmental issue.
By placing significant limits
on the amounts developing
countries can emit,
we risk preventing them from being able
to protect themselves in these same ways.
This could be another
talk in and of itself.
But isn’t talk of dealing
with the effects misplaced?
Surely the focus should be on prevention.
For countries like Tuvalu,
there will be no cure.
Without environmental reform,
it will be underwater.
Fortunately, we have a framework
for dealing with greenhouse gas
emissions and limiting them.
The bad news is that it is,
in legal terms, unenforceable.
The Paris Agreement was signed in 2015
and was hailed as a great
advancement over its predecessor,
the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
It requires every country that signed it
to review its greenhouse gas
emissions targets every five years,
and it draws no distinction between
developed and developing countries,
closing loopholes for countries
like China and India.
The method by which
these targets are worked out
is comprehensive and sensible
and produces good results.
Where the Paris Agreement fails
is that it doesn’t set out any penalties
for countries that fail
to adhere to their targets.
And even if it did,
the ability to penalise countries
like America, China, Britain and so forth
is fundamentally undercut
by the lack of political appetite
to expend diplomatic capital
on environmental issues.
This is symptomatic of the fact
that the UN disproportionately represents
the interests of its most
powerful members
and reinforces the disparities between
them and the less powerful members.
Any good-faith attempt
by individual countries,
powerful or not,
to act on the Paris targets
come into conflict
with the behaviour and interests
of many multinational corporations,
particularly in
the manufacturing industry.
Industrial polluters
create financial incentives
for countries to have loose
environmental regulations.
They form such a big part
of so many economies
that governments feel
that they must accommodate them
in order to maintain jobs and tax income.
They can move anywhere in the world
that’s willing to accommodate them,
and many countries feel
they aren’t in a position to say no.
So we find ourselves with two issues
and a possible solution.
The issues are governmental
and corporate behaviour,
and the possible solution
is the Paris Agreement.
The Paris framework has a lot
of notional value but is unenforced.
So how do we apply our solution?
We must accept that the UN
is not an effective body
for limiting greenhouse gas emissions,
and to continue to rely on it
will only reproduce the results
that Tuvalu has become used to.
We don’t know if we can save Tuvalu
from submersion, to be honest,
but it is clear that appropriate action
would at least slow the process.
So we must refocus our efforts
on the national scale.
Much as every person has the duty
to reduce their carbon footprint,
each individual now finds
themselves with the duty
of applying pressure to their government
to act upon the targets set out in Paris.
Every government,
whether democratic or not,
eventually has to respond
to overwhelming political will.
To put it in market terms,
if we create a demand
for governmental compliance
and we reduce the demand
for activities which hinder compliance,
we’re very likely to produce
politicians and governments
that want to capitalise on that.
And we don’t care if they’re doing it
for self-interested reasons or not;
we only care about results.
The same goes for the private sector
and multinational corporations.
We’ve already seen a shift
towards environmentally conscious
products and services.
But it’s important that we apply
market pressure to root out practices
such as simply moving production
out of view and into poorer countries.
The world doesn’t need any more
ineffective middle-class saviours -
Extinction Rebellion already
have the monopoly on that.
So what should we do?
We must create a targeted,
coherent messaging campaign
that will attain critical mass.
Social media provides us
with the perfect platform for this.
The Black Lives Matter protests
last summer proved that,
more than at any other time in history,
informal political movements can influence
formal political organizations,
namely governments.
Social media,
coupled with the interconnectedness
of the global consumer economy,
provides us with an as yet unrealised
avenue for achieving this.
The nature of social media
is, however, transitory.
And where so many movements fail
is in their inability
to take on a lasting form.
There’s no straightforward way
to overcome this.
Indeed, the rate of change
will only increase.
But by utilising these same tools
of interconnectedness,
we can not only influence
the actions of developed countries
but we can sustain our movement
by individually connecting with those
whom our actions affect most.
Every one of us can get
on social media right now
and find someone
from a small island nation,
an environmentally vulnerable country,
and learn something about their lives.
The great strength of these platforms
is that people volunteer this information.
I would encourage you all
to do exactly that.
So there is notional value
in organisations such as the UN,
but we can’t rely
on its powers of enforcement
any more than we can rely
on the selflessness of the individual
countries that dominate it.
We, the citizens of wealthy,
powerful countries,
are the only ones
that can create accountability.
Fortunately, this brave,
new world we’re entering
is more interconnected than ever,
both economically and socially.
We are presented with
an unprecedented opportunity
to collectivise all our power
around one clear, unified message:
to act for the common good.
Never think that the problem is too large.
Each one of us can,
through individual choice and action,
influence global events.
It might be that corporations
and governments are the largest actors,
but their power comes from us ultimately.
We must never forget that.
So we must become
an actor in our own right
and get behind one message:
that we need change
and that some need it
more urgently than others.
By recognising this difference in urgency,
we begin to create a lasting
environmental consciousness
that isn’t bound up in statistics
or Malthusian prophecy,
but in empathy for specific people
dealing with specific problems.
Perhaps the greatest cause
of environmental apathy
is the feeling that the problem
is too massive to relate to,
both in physical scale and time frame.
But maybe by refocusing our lens,
we can hone in once again
on that most relatable of entities:
one another.
And by doing that,
we take the first step
from apathy to empathy.
And that is how lasting change begins.
Thank you.