GLOBAL ETHICS FOR THE THIRD MILLENNIUM:
a series of interviews with outstanding personalities
 
Interviews by Patricia Morales
Globus Institute, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
 
Maritta von Bieberstein Koch-Weser: Nature Conservation and Equity
Interview by Patricia Morales

Download the word document --->here
 
(Note: The Challenge of Fontainebleau is attached at the end.)
 
Q.        You are doing interesting work as Director-General of the World Conservation Union (IUCN). Could you explain the ideals of the IUCN?
 
A.        The IUCN's mission is to influence, encourage, and assist societies to conserve nature and to manage natural resources sustainably. With this in mind, the World Conservation Union was founded by a group of visionaries in 1948. It was the first-ever international environmental organization. From the beginning, the IUCN had government members and members of civil society organizations and, of course, in its Commissions, committed individuals some of the foremost scientists of the period. Today it is the world's umbrella organization of environmental institutions. In addition to the natural sciences, we have among our expert- members also lawyers, economists, and sociologists reflecting our broader understanding of what it takes to preserve our planet.
 
The very compelling Appeal de Fontainebleau was issued in the place where the IUCN was founded. That was in 1998, when the IUCN turned 50. The bottom line for the IUCN council is that the IUCN strives for a just world that values and conserves nature. This is a one-sentence statement, but it has a lot of content.
 
Q.        What distinguishes the Appeal de Fontainebleau from other global documents for the Third Millennium? Could you explain the innovative message of Fontainebleau, its system of values, and the "call for action" for the different actors?
 
A.        When we talk about a just world, it means that we know that without social justice it will be very difficult to conserve natural resources. Conservation and sustainable management of natural resources depend on the mindsets and the goodwill of people. They also require more social justice, in the sense that degradation often happens because people are poor and have no other choice. We strive for a just world that values nature. We apply "value" in the economic sense, because it is essential to assign a value to natural resources they are not a free commodity. But "value" also means ethical values and simple appreciation. We love nature. We know it is far more than an economic good. So, when we use the term "value," we mean both kinds of values: spiritual as well as economic.
 
Q.        You can find this sense of "value" expressed in the Earth Charter?
 
A.            Exactly. We think the Earth Charter reflects an important movement. It tries to galvanize the values people share across the globe, no matter what their religion, no matter where they live. This global convergence of values is fundamental for conservation. When we say conservation, we mean more than protected areas namely the broader notion of sustainable development, of managing environmental assets in a way that does not make future generations poorer for our actions today. That is our orientation at the IUCN.
 
Q.        What role does the IUCN have as an environmental institution today, bringing together more than 900 environmental institutions, from 140 countries?
 
A.        Even the casual observer is aware of the orchestra of environmental institutions existing today. The IUCN was the one-and-only international organization 51 years ago. Now, fortunately and this is very much a success story from our vantage point there is a world of organizations. There are many local and national organizations. There are some 70 inter national network NGOs that are members of IUCN and share our task. There is UNEP, which did not even exist until the 1960s. So, we are trying to see what our contribution, our greatest "value added," can be today, in this new scenario where the environment has received a significant boost first in Stockholm and later in Rio.
 
We see ourselves as a service institution. Our main mission is to interconnect our members and to enhance their reach. We provide organizations and individuals who engage in nature conservation with information on biodiversity and environmental policies. We assist them with regard to implementing the UN Conventions for instance the Convention on Biological Diversity. And we can provide leadership in uniting members around shared causes.
 
We consider the Red Lists on endangered species, which are issued by IUCN's Species Survival Commission, as a core product. Unless we establish what is happening on the ground, in nature, we cannot plan nor measure performance adequately. As well as providing our knowledge network for the natural sciences, we also support policy-making and institution- building. Our main objective is to help shape new instruments, where they are needed, and to support the environmental agenda of governments by helping to communicate good ap proaches from one place on Earth to another.
 
Time matters, if you look at what we lose every year on Earth. Therefore, in the IUCN and especially in our Environmental Law Centre (ELC), we seek to contribute to the speed of innovation in policy-making. Consider the negative statistical trends annual losses in forestcover, ocean fish stocks, topsoil, or water reserves. The environmental Member institutions of IUCN have been energized by the Rio Earth Summit and Agenda 21. And yet, in most respects, we are not achieving enough progress to turn those negative trends around. It is an uneven race, between poor but committed environment institutions on the one hand, and well-heeled infrastructure sectors and private investment capabilities on the other. Mining of the environment has yet to come under control.
 
As a Union, we want to serve our members through building coalitions. One way we do this is by promoting the IUCN's role as a forum. Look at all the new issues that are coming up such as trade and the environment, or genetically-modified organisms. These are just two examples of the complexities we need to contend with. It does not matter whether you are in a government organization or whether you are in an NGO. You have difficulty getting the whole picture, and you look for places to have an exchange, and a balanced opportunity to learn. You probably look for a forum for exchange, which is less formal than UN meetings or government meetings on the subject a forum which prepares you for developing a more formal stance later.
 
This is a service which can be provided through the IUCN's national or regional committees, through our Commissions, through ad hoc discussions organized on a demand basis, or increasingly via the Internet. We are building up our website as best we can.
 
Q.        Could you explain the significance of the "hard law" for the environmental issues? For example, the Convention on Biodiversity is a key instrument for the NGOs in relation to national governments.
 
A.            Governments are obliged to implement these Conventions in as far as they have signed them. They are also looking for help because they do not have a system of thousands of scientists. The IUCN, through its network of expert volunteers, as well as through its member organizations, can be helpful and proactive for example, through our Global Biodiversity Forums. However, we need to remember that the Conventions are just one of the means by which governments seek to oblige environmental stewardship. We must keep our eyes fixed on results on the ground. A sharp eye for ultimate results is another IUCN contribution, realized especially through its global network of civil society organizations.
 
You need a global network to see beyond national borders: take the example of logging bans, as they have been decreed in recent years in some parts of east Asia. At first sight, the country decreeing the logging ban may look good but look beyond its borders. You will see that cutting less in one place can simply lead to cutting more in another; for instance, in your neighbors' backyards. Too often, the problem of rainforest clearing is just being shifted from one place to another. The IUCN sees such interconnections, as our membership straddles neighboring countries, importers and exporters. And we can connect and assist members in designing joint responses and strategies.
 
Thinking along the lines of national governments in the implementation of the Convention for Biological Diversity is not enough. We seek to foster cooperation across shared ecospaces, where sustainable development depends on long-term transboundary cooperation for example, in shared watersheds and river basins. The need for transboundary environmental cooperation is ubiquitous: the map of historically-grown nation-states is not congruent with the map of environmentally- and inextricably-connected ecopaces. Hence the importance for ecospace based cooperative forums, which the IUCN can so well promote.
 
We seek to foster foresight thinking about the long-term especially since the world population will probably grow to 8 billion over the coming decades, and it is likely that we will witness further large-scale changes in infrastructure in the twenty-first century. As we speak, major new water transfers, hydroways, additional highways, and railroad systems are under active consideration the world over. Infrastructure upgrades have tremendous direct and indirect impact on land use and the prospects for sustainable development. The better infrastructure investments are planned, and the more environmental and social assessments shape options and ultimate design, the greater the chance for a sustainable Earth. To this end, informed and timely public debate of alternatives is essential.
 
One of the IUCN's strengths is that we are not confined to an ivory tower. In our field offices, we participate in local development projects, helping on a day-to-day basis with design and implementation of environmental programs and action plans. It is this reality-check which makes the IUCN such a helpful organization.
 
Q.        What are the major challenges for the Third Millennium, with respect to caring for the Earth and humanity?
 
A.        Our vision for the future is to think in terms of global and regional neighborhood. We all share one planet, one finite stock of resources, from water and soil to biological species. We must complement the web of economic- and trade-related connections with an equally strong web of integrated environmental governance. The goods we use every day are derived from natural resources from all corners of the Earth. We are completely connected in terms of our consumption, and we need to be just as connected in terms of thinking about global resources. The country-by-country approach does not meet the challenge anymore; in fact, it can at times stand in the way of meaningful, coherent environmental action.
 
Q.        Why did you state in the Conference on Globalization, Ecology, and Economy (Tilburg, 24 11 99) that "We need to move beyond aid for the global environment"?
 
A. If we are honest as global thinkers, we cannot label contributions to environmental preservation in other parts of the world, outside our immediate neighborhoods, as "aid" or charity. These "global" contributions are in good measure self-serving; they are our share in enabling the long-term survival of our species. So far, the investments we are making globally for the good of the environment are less than a market success: we continue to lose biological species at ever-growing, unprecedented rates; forests the size of small countries burn up every year; and we talk more about the water crisis than we solve it.
 
If we want to make a positive difference, we have to give it more energy, more resources, and more political clout. This is why I suggest moving beyond token aid and charity. We need to create much larger funding systems than, for instance, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and we need to make them sustainable. Environmental protection requires more than temporary projects: above all, it needs maintenance. It is not a temporary but a permanent need. We have made a good start since the late 1980s, but we are not doing enough to reach our targets. This is frustrating when you consider how much money otherwise flows through the economies of the world. For instance, the annual global budget of the UNEP is equivalent to no more than the cost of constructing a large hotel or bridge. If defense budgets could be reallocated, for example, the equivalent in cost to one aircraft carrier could positively revolutionize our environmental defense of the Earth. It is not popular to view environment against the background of what governments and societies spend on other sectors, but in a competitive world we must do so with increasing transparency.
 
For the twenty-first century we need a new system. We need to overcome our fixation with the short term always up to the next election, up to the next assignment. The environment is not a project: it requires long-term accountability systems, commitments, and uninterrupted programs, decade after decade.
 
Let us take an example. If, for instance, your country received financing from the GEF to es tablish a better national park system over the coming 4 5 years, the greatest challenge will await you once the project is "completed." You must then find a system that assures maintenance of your achievements, of your national parks system in perpetuity. We need to maintain parks forever, but so far there is no "forever" system in place. Some 9.6 percent of the Earth's land surface is under some degree of natural protection a large piece of real estate waiting to be better maintained.
 
Maybe that is my biggest dream: a global sharing of the burden to enable long-term sustained efforts. We do not need to change the principles. Under the GEF the world has acknowledged that we have a globally-shared interest in maintaining our basic resources. Since biodiversity is irregularly distributed on Earth, we should share the conservation burden of countries where a disproportionate amount of global biological resources are concentrated. I think that the very same principle should apply to a long-term maintenance-oriented environmental finance sys tem.
 
Q.        This is the call for action of the Appeal de Fontainebleau.
 
A.        Yes, and this must be a call for sustained action. The call for action has prompted many people and they will do one project, one conference, one initiative. But little is changed by these flurries of activity, little is sustained. In many countries you can extend this observation to the area of law. A law is passed with some fanfare, but it may not be implemented and enforced. With hindsight, the action started by one democratic government turns into a transient political gesture, discontinued by the next government. Our societies cannot afford this waste. If we are fighting to preserve species and to implement the CBD, we need a more resilient, sturdy, and globally-anchored system that can help safeguard environmental programs irrespective of periodic governmental changes.
 
Q.        Which priorities do you foresee for the Ombudsman Function (OmCED) project, shared by the Earth Council, the IUCN and the University of Peace?
 
A.        There are will always be conflicts born of diverse interests and understandings when it comes to the delimitations and interpretations of sustainable development. Where did such conflicts typically arise in the past? Examples include large hydropower projects or other "pyramid"-size works. On the one hand, societies may want large projects; on the other hand, they may well abhor them. OmCED, our new independent international Ombudsman Center for Environment and Development (operated jointly by the Earth Council and IUCN) can be called upon in the early, upstream phase of any such projects to provide a fair airing of all interests prior to any decisions affecting long-lasting environmental change.
 
We saw the need for a neutral forum that would bring together the opinions of proponents large and small, mighty and powerless. Governments, the private sector, and civil society need to find constructive, mediated forums for dialogue. Too often, when conflicts arise, the discussion is out of balance, with the education-wise and financially well-equipped proponents (e.g. bankers or construction companies) on one side, and poorer, and more poorly-educated local stakeholders on the other. In some cases, the most directly-affected stakeholders include illiterate or marginalized populations. Some cases affect indigenous peoples. Local government offices, especially in developing countries, can equally be at a disadvantage when it comes to the understanding of large scale, complex projects they may have no capacity to scrutinize a highly-sophisticated environmental impact assessment. In such situations we want to see whether OmCED can add value from the vantage point of all involved. An Ombudsman should not, as you know, decide one way or another, but it would help the parties to be respected, to have voice and to be as well-informed as possible.
 
Q.        What kind of an innovative role will this Ombudsman Function have?
 
A.        Let us start with a question: what is the difference between the Ombudsman function and the public audience requirements already existing in many countries? True, many of the environmentally more-advanced countries have a public audience system, and a fair public audience may do justice to all. Where this is the case, you will not need an external Om budsman. However, even where audience systems exist, they can be quite perfunctory. They happen on one day, and whoever hears about it goes there. The true stakeholders, affected people, may be not be well-equipped to represent their interests, and this is where the Ombudsman Function offers a new avenue, adding fairness and thus rendering the process more meaningful. Even more importantly, it also offers a novel path in the many places where audience systems are lacking altogether. That is where the Ombudsman function is most needed.
 
OmCED is a concrete response to the need for a new international mechanism on sustainable development and global governance. In response to the question "What relationship will be established with the national sovereignties?" it must be stated that the Ombudsman function is designed as a service, which will be available on a demand basis. The Ombudsman will, whenever approached, consider helping, provided it can muster the help and expertise needed to assure a high-quality process. It can only function where sovereign national entities involved would not object.
 
Q.        What about the future of the IUCN and your own dreams? Do you have biodiversity dreams?
 
A. Well, no high-flying dreams. Just down-to-earth housekeeping: we must not lose more biodiversity than we have already lost. It sounds so easy but it is so vexingly difficult. If the IUCN as a Union can galvanize policy processes and action programs that bring us closer to the goals of species survival, this would be the finest contribution our organization can make. People can be a power for good, and also for destruction of our increasingly-crowded planet. We have the scientific knowledge, we have the technology, we have even good policy and legal prescriptions. Now we have to apply them. So we have to work with people. We need people who want to invest in those technologies. A lot of destruction has to do with how people think and act. Changing mindsets and communicating and educating the next generations are key to our mission.
 
Social organization and social values are underpinnings for conserving biodiversity. We do not necessarily need a greater number of biologists to safeguard diversity, but a greater number of sympathetic, proactive people will make the difference. Finally, we must recover our historic abilities for transgenerational thinking. Remember the cathedrals which were built in the Middle Ages? Building them took 150 years (Cathedral of Florence) or even 500 years (Cathedral of Cologne). Behold and admire the foresight these people had. They carried stones and patiently paid taxes for generation after generation so that in the future there would be a cathedral. They thought this was important, although they had every certainty that they themselves could never live to see the end result. Transpose the thought and it takes you to planning for the year 2500. And think, how much more we might do to save our planet, if we could get a little of this cathedral mentality back into our modern short-lived systems. Without "cathedrals for the environment" we will not get the quorum that is necessary to save the globe.
 
Q.        Is that your dream for the Third Millennium?
 
A. Yes, that is my dream: to save the future by restoring the foresight that our forebearers had. Let us think about Rio + 100 or Rio + 500. This should lead us to a much faster adoption of environment friendly technologies and strategies today, even if we have to pay a bit more or if we have to carry the equivalent of a few more stones in our lifetime. Good environmental stewardship has a cost. "Win win" remains a most powerful argument for investing in environmentally-friendly strategies but the "wins" will often be realized over generations, not just the next few years to come. The flipside of this argument is that I have become apprehensive about excessive market orientation, because this is the orientation fixed on the here and now, on short-term returns. Today's market does not value what people will value 100 years from now.
 
Q.        Mr Gorbachev talked about three walls: the Berlin Wall, the wall between us and the future generations, and the wall between the rich and the poor. What do you think about this statement? Equity is also a focal point for IUCN.
 
A.            Beautifully said, and an encouragement. The Berlin Wall has come down already, and so must the other two. Let us plant trees again for future generations, and let us never become accustomed to the ravine that divides the rich from the poor on Earth. Unjust societies have tumbled in the course of history, overrun by discontent and destruction. In a global society, with no other planet to go to, we cannot dare to imagine what this means.
 
Q.        Could you mention the major tensions surrounding the integration of biodiversity, equity, and the eradication of poverty?
 
A.        The poor suffer most from bad environmental conditions, but the damage is mostly caused by the rich. Some of the poor literally live on top of garbage dumps go see it, in Kingston, Jamaica, or outside Manila, in the Philippines. And if you ask: "Who breathes the worst air, who drinks the foulest water, who has to do agriculture on the most degraded soils?" Again, it is the poor. The poverty conundrum is misrepresented when people pretend that it is just the poor who cause environmental devastation.
 
Rich people also cause devastation, and frequently on a more massive scale. The rich are wasteful consumers. The rich can afford to invest in the huge equipment that can transform so much of our environment in so little time. I have seen it in the Amazon. You can destroy entire landscapes in a matter of a year of two with mighty Caterpillar or John Deere equipment. It allows you to tear down trees, to really runover the landscape, and to burn it up. Other sectors provide salient examples just think of large ocean trawlers and our dwindling fish grounds world-wide. The tools that wreak the most destruction can be afforded by the rich, not the poor. Statistics show that in the last 50 years we have changed the face of the Earth like no people before us in the entire history of humankind. Therefore, we may need to become more concerned about capital-intensive, rapid, and large-scale transformations. We must also overcome the image that poverty is the greatest motor of destruction.
 
Q.        What do you think about the tensions of priorities between the environment and human rights? In particular, if we look at the vulnerable situation of the indigenous peoples being victims of bad ecological priorities. In the name of protecting nature, sometimes people are considered irrelevant. Some projects try to care for nature and the consequences are harmful to indigenous peoples. What is the position of the IUCN on this?
 
A. To avoid conflicts we need carefully-crafted solutions tailored case by case. I will give you an example. In the 1980s I worked on a project in Rondonia, Brazil. The area, called Uru- eu-wau-wau, is a national park and it is also an indigenous reserve. To get to this dual designation was not easy. I will never forget the heated debate between the conservationists and protagonists of the indigenous cause. Here was a tiny remnant group of indigenous people, within 1 million hectares of intact ancestral rainforest. And conservationists indulged in endless discussion as to what damage those peoples were going to do to their original homeland, now called national park. I am convinced that man and nature can be protected in harmony. Ideology, putting one above the other, will not help but hinder the cause of environment.
 
Q.        And what is your dream about the future of IUCN?
 
A.        I believe the real time for the IUCN has only just begun. Membership has grown sharply in the 1990s, and we have our place in global governance for sustainable development. We offer a forum the world needs bringing together under one Union the world's foremost scientists, policy-makers, NGOs, governments, and governmental institutions. We will make every effort to live up to this potential and to the trust our members place in IUCN.
 
Q.        I wish you the best in performing your function at IUCN in promoting the empower ment and participation of people for nature conservation and equity.
 
 
 
IUCN, Fontainebleau Challenge, 5 November 1998
 
(for the interview with Maritta von Bieberstein Koch-Weser)
 
We celebrate our 50th anniversary. We are in Fontainebleau, our birthplace, at the invitation of the French government. We are the product of our founders: a Union of 74 states, 110 government agencies, and 706 non-governmental organizations drawn from 138 countries. We draw insight and inspiration from powerful volunteer networks which span the world. We stand for the conservation of the integrity and diversity of nature. We seek to ensure that natural resource use is equitable and ecologically sustainable. IUCN was born in an age scarred by war. Today our planet is scarred by environmental destruction. Humanity's production and consumption has increased exponentially. Population has tripled. We have become increasingly urbanized. A quarter of the world's tropical forests have disappeared. Freshwater, the biosphere's bloodstream, is contaminated and overexploited. The life support systems upon which humanity depends are threatened from all sides. In the face of these realities, we haveimagined tomorrow's world. It is a world that celebrates and nurtures the essential diversity of life, of cultures and peoples. It is a world in which we will embrace a new environmental ethic that recognizes that without nature there is no happiness, no tranquillity, no life. We seek harmony in nature and unity among peoples, for without these, life on Earth is not sustainable.
 
We believe that the benefits of biological diversity must be shared equitably. No longer will we stand by and see the poor bear the brunt of nature's destruction. No longer can we say we are at peace when we are only in the absence of global war: no longer can we say we are secure when the livelihoods of the poorest are weighed in the balance each day, and species and ecosystems are lost and degraded at a rate beyond our understanding.
 
Our challenge is not just to imagine, but to build a world, rich in diversity and confident in its commitment to equity. We will build, each one of us: governments, international agencies, economic actors, scientists, educators and the media, civil society organizations, and as members of IUCN. We will build it as mentors, experts and advisors as children, parents, friends, and colleagues. We will build it with our hands where we live and work. We will build it in our minds as we shape policies at the local, national, regional, and global levels. We will demonstrate it in the way we live our lives. Future generations will judge us, with unblinking eye, on our timidity in the global struggles to combat climate change, to protect the oceans, to sustain life in a contaminated world, and to flourish in a world of mega-cities. Future generations will judge us not only on the state of the world they inherit, but on the knowledge, tools, and practices we pass on for them to use resources wisely. Our challenge from Fontainebleau is to ourselves and others. We must go beyond simply awareness. Beyond Rio the next century will be a century of action. Our challenge is to help generate the political will to act; to carry out the manifold promises that have been made in the last decades of environmental activism. We call upon governments and intergovernmental organizations to move beyond short-termism: to invest their power in developing a new politic that recognizes conservation and sustainable use of natural resources as central to the economic and social security of all peoples, and where nature recaptures its role in relieving human suffering. So that environment and security threats may be anticipated and preempted, we call for a greater coherence amongst institutions in the global governance system which is sorely lacking. Our challenge is to convince political and economic decision-makers to act with caution and precaution. The instruments of present economic and trade policies and their impacts must be reformed where they are a constraint to justice and equity. We call upon economic actors to recognize their responsibility for the well being of communities and to the peace and stability of the regions from which they derive their profits. We call upon them to act with honesty and transparency and to lead the way in reforming economic systems which penalize equity and sustainability.
 
We call upon scientific communities to bring their knowledge, wisdom, and vision to political decision-makers, economic actors, the worlds of education and the media to inform debate and reinforce democracy. Our challenge is to generate an information age that educates, informs, explains, and communicates our relationships to the natural world, and which makes conservation and sustainable use of natural resources our second nature. We call upon educators of our youth and those in the media to bring the messages and the vastness of the conservation challenges to all and to use, in our endeavors, nature as a unifying factor of our diversity .Our challenge is to put equity at the heart of political and economic decision-making, together with the universality of human rights, and the knowledge, wisdom, and insights of peoples. We call upon civil society organizations to mobilize their constituencies for conservation, to hold to account, to demand change, to lead by example, and to protect the rights of people to land and resources. We encourage young people to use natural resources sustainably and equitably, to build upon our beginnings and to bring new ideas and the talents of their era to conserve nature, protect rights, and improve the quality of life of all. Finally, from all four corners of the world, we commit ourselves to communicate all that we know of the workings and values of nature and our relationships to it, and of the science of conservation, to the decision-makers of today and to the generations to come. We commit ourselves to fashioning tools that we and others need to make our imagined world real. We will bring to these challenges energy, vigilance, and a renewed spirit of hope. Gathered here in Fontainebleau we acknowledge how much we are indebted to nature, of which we are but one part.