Climate Change: The State of the Debate
Report by Alex Evans and David Steven, written for the London Accord (December 2007).
Looking ahead: foreign policy reform in 2008
The last working day before Christmas. Time to brave the streets and get those last few presents? Bah! Here at Global Dashboard we’re made of sterner stuff, so naturally our thoughts are skipping over the festive season altogether and focusing instead on strategic goals for 2008 – and in particular the need, still outstanding, to fix the UK’s foreign policy apparatus.
So here, in what passes for our warped variation on festive cheer, are two stocking fillers to print out and take home with you: the full text of Sir Richard Mottram’s speech on national security, given at Demos earlier this week, and a speech on FCO reform given by William Wallace at Chatham House on 7 December.
There’s now a burgeoning literature on why and how governments need to overhaul their co-ordination structures to deal more effectively with cross-cutting global risks like terrorism, climate change, pandemics, energy security and economic shocks. So early next year, we’ll be launching a ‘canon’ of reading on the theory and practice of reforming foreign policy to deal more effectively with global risks. Please let us know what should be on it and we’ll link to it. (You can find our email addresses on the Contact page.)
2007 has been a rich year for debate of these issues, but consensus on the actual reforms needed lies still in the future. The UK is an especially good country in which to start work on some tangible proofs of concept, given the range of people here thinking actively about these issues, and given Britain’s potential to act as a springboard from which to apply innovations to EU, UN and other international bodies also suffering from a coherence deficit. Given how many global risks are now coming home to roost, 2008 is the year in which debate needs to turn into action.
Happy Christmas.
US EUCOM: the real scarce resources will be food and water, not oil and gas
While we’re on the subject of food, two interesting things to report from the Brussels conference that I mentioned a couple of posts ago:
First, it looks as though there may be pressure in Brussels for the EU to revisit its (extremely ill-advised) target for 10% of transport fuels to come from biofuels by 2020. Avril Doyle, an MEP who sits on the EP’s Environment and Climate Change Committees, was especially blunt about this, having returned from Bali apparently horrified by the revelation that the amount of corn it takes to fill a fuel tank with ethanol could feed someone for a year (a stat I can’t vouch for, not having come across it before). The EU’s target was, she said, a policy commitment made in good faith, but loooked now like it had been a mistake.
Interestingly, Tom Spencer – a former MEP who used to chair the EP Foreign Affairs Committee and who remains a leading light of GLOBE, the global network of green-minded Parliamentarians – flatly rebutted the notion that Brussels had set the target on the basis of a sustainability case that was sincere if perhaps flawed. In fact, he said, GLOBE had made it abundantly clear to MEPs throughout the policy development process that a biofuels target of the kind that was set would have serious, negative repercussions for global food security; but, he went on, the EP had backed the target anyway, not on the basis of a sustainability case, but purely and simply because of pressure from agricultural lobbies.
The other interesting point on food was in remarks made by a USAF Colonel representing EUCOM, the US military command for Europe. In an arrestingly forthright presentation, he led on the argument that in years to come, the real scarce resources were not, as policymakers were starting to think, oil and gas: instead, it would be food and water.
Food security: presentation to PM’s Strategy Unit
As promised a few weeks back, here’s the presentation on rising food prices that I gave the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit a couple of weeks ago.
The Strategy Unit team working on food policy haven’t yet made any of their research public, but if / when they do, it will appear on the project web page here. Although the SU is primarily looking at the issue from a UK perspective, my presentation leads on the international dimensions – in particular the drivers of rising food prices, and the implications internationally. All comments very welcome…
Can Poland deliver?
I spoke at a conference organised by the Institute for Environmental Security in Brussels earlier this week. (Here’s the speech I gave, which updates the argument from The Post-Kyoto Bidding War to take account of Bali – and in particular the US’s shift from arguing for no binding targets for anyone, to arguing that if developed countries have binding targets, then so should developing ones.)
The overall theme of the conference was ‘from Bali to Poznan’ – the latter being the place in Poland where next year’s UNFCCC gathering will be held. With this in mind, the organisers secured a presentation from Poland’s Ambassador to the EU. You might have thought that the Poles would want to rise to the occasion and capitalise on the post-Bali good cheer among Eurocrats. Not a bit of it: instead, we had a rambling discussion that was heavy on Poland’s impressive track record in energy efficiency but light on strategy.
As one of the other speakers at the conference later remarked, Poland is essentially emerging from a rather, well, crazy period. It needs to show other EU member states that it’s not just a big member state, but that it has big ideas as well. A good start to that enterprise might be to have some kind of narrative about why it wanted to host the halfway point conference on the road from Bali to Copenhagen. As things stand now, officials who work on climate change are quietly dreading the prospect of the Poles chairing the summit…