Plenary Address of Klaus Töpfer
Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme
At The Earth Dialogues Forum
Opening Plenary Session
February 21, 2002
Lyon, France
 
 
Monsieur le Président,
Monsieur le Premier Ministre,
Mesdames, Messieurs,
Chers amis et collègues,
 
Malheureusement, ma capacité de parler en français est limitée.  Nous sommes localisés à Nairobi, en Kenya.  C’est l’Afrique anglophone et c’est pourquoi nous n’avons pas l’occasion de parler.  Et c’est un désastre pour votre vocabulaire et c’est pourquoi ce n’est pas très, très agréable pour vous d’avoir ma présentation en français.  C’est pourquoi malheureusement [elle serait] en anglais.   C’est un désastre, mais j’espère que [quand] nous aurons le deuxième sommet comme ça à Lyon, j’aurais la capacité déjà de parler couramment. Merci.
 
Thanks very much.  It is of course an honour for me to be invited by President Gorbachev and by my good old friend Maurice Strong.  By the way, he is my grandfather in this office.  He was the first Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme. We are now thirty years old.  So you see that being an Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme gives you good health for a long time.  I count on this, Maurice as well. 
 
And I am excited to have also the chance to be here in Lyon, a city of outstanding cultural history, also outstanding people coming from this city.  Let me start by simply saying that I am very convinced that sustainable development is and will be in the future even more the peace policy on the global level.  It will be a peace policy because we are aware that with regard to the youth of the environmental services, we will have more and more tensions, more and more conflicts, and the risk even of wars.  We can see this in the history of the organisation I am responsible for.  As I mentioned, thirty years old.  Why, there was a first summit, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in those days was the name.  It was really an environment summit because there was more and more the growing conviction that there is something like an export of costs of private production to other people.  I will never forget the protest of our colleagues in the Netherlands that they have in the sludges of the harbour in Rotterdam the problems coming from the chemical industry upstream.  They had to pay with regard to the cleaning of their harbour what was not done upstream with regard to handling sewage water or to avoid sewage water.  This was in the regional context.  And more and more it was clear there are those externalities also going on at the global level.  The consequence, my predecessor tries very hard to make legally binding arrangements to avoid those externalities, those exports of costs to other people.  To avoid that other people have to pay the bill for the well-being of others.  Knowing that if this is not possible that we will be having quite soon conflicts and tensions.  And therefore the topic is very closely linked between poverty and environment.  For quite a lot of the poverty we are confronted with today is also linked with the externalisation of the costs of private consumption and production in developed countries.
 
Let me mention this with regard to climate change.  As I informed you in the very beginning, this organization is located in Nairobi in Kenya.  By the way, I will never forget in those days when I got the offer to be responsible for this organisation, quite a lot of friends at home mentioned “wonderful to be responsible for the global environment, but in Kenya? In Nairobi? How can you do it?”  Today, ladies and gentleman, I am more than ever convinced that there cannot be a better place for an environment organisation than in centre of poverty of this world.  We are confronted day by day with those problems, the problems of those externalisation of costs.  Africa has a share in the global population of 14%, nearly the same as Europe. But Africa has only a share of the global CO2 emission of 3.2%, but Africa is suffering most from the consequences of climate change.  There we have the concentration of abnormal weather conditions.  There we have the change of rainfall.  There we have the increase of desertification.
 
And therefore, ladies and gentleman, good friends and colleagues, it is good to ask for the 0.7% of GNP.  Quite a lot of our taxpayers in European countries and developed countries are convinced that it is something like charity, that it is something like aid.  I have to inform you it is not charity.  We have not to ask for debt relief, but we have to ask for debt for debt swaps.  We have debts there as well and I only mentioned climate.  See there are those global commons, those global commons which are not privatised, which cannot be handled by market prices and the people having the responsibility for those assets cannot benefit from those assets.
 
I have just come from the Mexican city of Cancun.  It’s also nice for tourists but that was not the reason.  It was a meeting of the twelve countries with the highest biodiversity in the world: Mexico, China, India, Brazil, Costa Rica, South Africa, Indonesia and others.  And they decided to have a group of like-minded countries asking where have we the chance of benefit-sharing.  Others are using the biodiversity, the genetic resources in our countries for producing goods and bio-technology, and the products coming back from this, they are covered by intellectual property rights.  And we are without any chance to benefit from the fact that in our countries we were responsible for the conservation of this diversity.  Developed countries are more or less environment, biodiversity-poor countries.  There is a negative correlation with biodiversity and poverty and as long as we cannot make this also an asset, I believe we have a problem what with regard to Johannesburg.  And therefore to make this only one example, I believe there is a lot of need - yes, Yolanda Kakabadse, good friend, the world is a planet and not a market place.  But having a market economy on this globe, then lets make at least an honest use of market economy.  Lets integrate those costs in the prices we have to pay, not as a social development but as a need to stimulate technologies where we have bottlenecks signalled by prices.  And lets go also a good way back to values.  Congratulations, Mr. Mestrallet for what he and his company are doing. Yes, we need the prices to signal the limitations and the bottlenecks, of course.  But I believe with regard to water we need also to be aware that in all religions around the world - in all - water is something like a sacred good. If you go to baptism in Christianity, if you go to the holy Koran and to others, you will see that this is a very sacred good and therefore it is very, very helpful to learn that there is not a privatisation of water.  Water, c’est la vie, c’est vrai.
 
And therefore we have also to go back a little bit in those values so that people respect water, that they don’t spoil it because it is a sacred good, that they don’t misuse it, that they are aware of bottlenecks and limitations that we cannot give the signal that each and everything in this world is unlimited, is only depending on the investment of private capital.  I believe this is the need we have to underline in Johannesburg.  There is a request to come in Johannesburg to what is called the Global Deal.  The European Union underlines this as their aim in the Gottenburg summit, again this is the perspective.  You can discuss whether a deal is too economically overloaded, wording from the other side.  It gives you also the feeling where both sides have assets to offer.  And I believe that is very important, that we know that developing countries have assets to offer.  They have to offer this biodiversity I mentioned.  They are the young societies around the world.  They have the chance for human capital so urgently needed for the future.  We are here in Europe knowing that we have a decrease of the population and all the countries here are discussing what is this immigration policy.  I’m a little bit ashamed I have to confess that we in Europe only ask what is helpful for us and not what is helpful to make those capacities also available in developing countries itself.  At least I have to ask this question.
 
So they have to offer and they have to offer cultural and spiritual values.  These are intensively interrelated to biological diversity.  We made in UNEP a broad study on the interrelation between biodiversity and cultural diversity.  The correlation is extremely clear.  If as an indicator - the indicator of languages - we know that we have on the globe right now something like 6,800 different languages.  2,800 of those languages are on the Red List of endangered languages.  And if you correlate this with the Red List of endangered biodiversity, you have a direct interrelation.  Where you are losing cultural diversity, you are losing biodiversity. 
 
So it is necessary to make clear that the globalisation process cannot have the price of uniformity, but we have to combine globalisation with identity and different diversities in cultural and spiritual values and biological diversity.  This is the change and to do this with the clear consequences that diversity, cultural diversity is not misused as an alibi for exclusion but it is used as a basis for tolerance.  This is a need in this Global Deal, to integrate this is a huge challenge, and I sincerely hope that this summit in Johannesburg, the Summit on Sustainable Development, can come to something like a responsible prosperity for all.  Yes, we need a coalition, we need another coalition, a coalition for humanity, a coalition against poverty, against environment destruction.  This is needed if you want to have what I mentioned in the very beginning, a clear consequence result that sustainable development is and will be even more the peace policy in the future. Thank you very much.