BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR
The only power the United Nations has is the “power of persuasion” – and that doesn’t seem to be working too well.
Here’s a profound interview with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres about everything from climate change to vaccine nationalism (h/t Naveen Srivastava):
Besides powerlessness, a second powerful idea we hear about is the “GDP Paradox” – a failure of our economic indicators.
Note its connection to the “Death of Nature“:
“Look at what’s happening with storms, with hurricanes, the rising sea level, glaciers melting, the ice-cap in the Arctic risking to disappear; with biodiversity being lost: one million species are at risk of disappearing. We see that the world we knew will change dramatically and will destroy life. And in the end it’s our life that will be destroyed. There is one thing that is a paradox: when you destroy a forest you are creating GDP – according to the statistics. When you overfish you are increasing your GDP – according to the statistics – when you destroy the planet … you are showing an increase of GDP so even that needs to be changed. We need to have a new way to measure our economy to measure our activity to make sure that we take into account the dramatic cost that we all face by the destruction of nature.”
What can be done to help? We have to focus on the G20 – the countries with power.
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