Iceland hails plan to establish single new UN agency for women

Iceland today welcomed recently announced plans to amalgamate four United Nations agencies and offices that promote the rights and well-being of women worldwide and encourage gender equality into one single entity within the Organization.

No impunity for political killers, Guinea-Bissau says at UN Assembly

Determining who is responsible for a series of assassinations of senior political and military figures in Guinea-Bissau earlier this year is essential to consolidating the rule of law in the troubled West African country, its Prime Minister told the General Assembly today as he pledged that there would be no impunity for the perpetrators.

Climate and economic crises taking heavy toll on Caribbean nations, leaders tell UN

While climate change and the global economic crisis are a challenge for all, they are particularly difficult for the small, island nations of the Caribbean, several leaders from the region told the United Nations General Assembly today.

Barack Obama plays down the need to finalise a deal on climate change

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 September 2009 19.56 BST
Barack Obama has talked down the importance of sealing a global deal on climate change before the end of the year, world leaders said yesterday.
Obama’s comments, made in private talks at the G20 summit, downplay the need to reach a strong deal at UN talks in Copenhagen in December and contradict the United Nations and others, who have billed the meeting as a crucial moment for the world to avoid catastrophic global warming. The president did win a partial victory on his signature climate issue at this G20 summit – removing fossil fuel subsidies – but there was no headway on the much bigger issue of climate finance, which Obama had taken up as his issue at the last G20.
Barring small but significant steps forward from China and India, there has been little progress this week at a UN summit or the G20 towards a deal at Copenhagen. Obama’s remarks yesterday resonated among world leaders, who have been looking to America – as historically the world’s greatest polluter – to lead on climate change.
“I would cite what President Obama said to us at our meetings and that is that while Copenhagen is a very important meeting we should not view it as a make or break on climate change. It will be a step, an ongoing step, in an important world process to deal with this critical issue,” Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, said yesterday. Harper cited the comments when he said he was not inclined to take up Gordon Brown’s challenge to attend the meeting himself, in order to add political weight to the negotiations.
South Korea’s Lee Myung-bak also referenced Obama’s remarks. “The Copenhagen climate summit meeting is not the end, but it is going to be the start of a new beginning, and having that kind of perception is more realistic,” he said. There was no immediate comment from the White House on Obama’s remarks.
It is accepted that the Copenhagen negotiations will not be able to finalise all details of a treaty to get the world to act together on global warming. But Obama’s comments could jeopardise efforts to get the most comprehensive agreement possible, said observers. “What is causing increasing concern is the continuing deadlock in political action to deal with this challenge,” said Rajendra Pachauri, the UN top climate scientist who shared a Nobel peace prize with Al Gore. The G20 did agree to back Obama’s efforts to end the world’s $300bn of annual subsidies on fossil fuel, which encourage the burning of polluting fuels. However, the leaders failed to agree on Obama’s five-year time frame for phasing out subsidies, agreeing only on “medium term” action.
The subsidy deal will do little to advance the Copenhagen negotiations, said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s clearly a victory for Obama to get something meaningful on this,” he said. “But it is not going to help us get a deal at Copenhagen.”
The issue that could have unlocked negotiations – finance for developing countries to cope with global warming impacts and pay for green energy technology – got pushed to the sidelines at Pittsburgh. Although Obama had wanted this G20 to produce hard figures on climate finance, world leaders decided instead to postpone the issue to a finance ministers’ meeting in November.

Foreign extremists behind much of the fighting in Somalia, UN debate hears

The fighting and humanitarian suffering that continues to engulf much of Somalia is the work largely of foreign extremists taking advantage of the anarchy that has prevailed in the Horn of Africa country for almost 20 years, the General Assembly’s annual high-level debate has heard.

Climate and economic crises taking heavy toll on Caribbean, leaders tell UN

While climate change and the global economic crisis are a challenge for all, they are particularly difficult for the small, island nations of the Caribbean, several leaders from the region told the United Nations General Assembly today.

The Constant Economy by Zac Goldsmith

Caroline Lucas spots some obvious gaps in a 10-step plan for the environment
Caroline Lucas
The Guardian, Saturday 26 September 2009
The challenge of raising the profile of green issues is hardly a new one. Back in 1974, Teddy Goldsmith fought a general election on behalf of “People”, which later became the Green party. Searching for an eye-catching way of highlighting the issue of soil erosion in East Anglia, Teddy led a camel on a lead bearing the slogan: “No deserts in Suffolk. Vote Goldsmith.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, he lost his deposit.
The Constant Economy
: How to Build a Stable Society
by Zac Goldsmith
256,
Atlantic Books
Buy The Constant Economy at the Guardian bookshop
Thirty five years later, his nephew, Zac Goldsmith, parliamentary candidate for the Conservative party in Richmond Park, is unlikely to lose his deposit, and he has chosen a more orthodox method of promoting his ideas. His new book, The Constant Economy, sets out 10 steps which the government must take to “restore balance to our relationship with the world around us”.
For Goldsmith, a “constant economy” is one in which resources are valued, food is grown sustainably and goods are built to last. It is a system which recognises nature’s limits, where energy security is based on renewable resources and strong communities are valued as the most effective protection against social, economic and environmental instability.
Each chapter elaborates on one of the 10 steps, and offers inspiring examples of where solutions are already being practised (frustratingly without footnotes or references). Yet for a book nominally about the economy, Goldsmith has surprisingly little to say about economics. In spite of its title, the book doesn’t draw on the ground-breaking work of Herman Daly and his development of “steady state economics”, nor does it go as far as the Sustainable Development Commission’s equally ground-breaking recent report, Prosperity Without Growth.
Rather, it repeats the well-trodden ground of the limits to GDP and the importance of alternative economic indicators, perhaps reflecting in its reluctance to enter deeper into the economics debate his own ambivalence about the role of the market.
Caricaturing the green movement as having “fractured” into “lighter” greens, who promote green consumerism, and “darker” greens, who promote “alarm, pessimism and disenchantment”, he criticises the latter for believing that “we are faced with a choice between the economy and ecology.”
Yet that’s not what most greens, dark or otherwise, believe. The choice, rather, is between a steady state economy, in balance with our wider environment, or an economy based on endless economic growth, which is likely to destroy our environment, yet which continues to be promoted by all three of the larger parties.
And while it is certainly true that, in the past, the green movement has not spent enough time promoting the benefits of a post-carbon economy, if he really thinks that most greens deliberately identify “the hardest, most punitive solutions, and when they describe the challenge, it is invariably insurmountable”, then he’s spending too much time with the wrong people.
The 10 steps which Goldsmith describes are certainly good ones, but I’m not sure we can let him off the hook for the issues he chooses not to address – population growth, for one. To his credit, he acknowledges that it “deserves a chapter to itself”, but he declines to give it one because “this book is about solutions, and there are not obvious or ethically acceptable solutions to population growth”. At a time when millions of women in the south are desperate for the means to control their own fertility, and when governments in the north are perversely giving incentives to women to have larger families, this seems an odd conclusion to draw.
Electoral reform is another issue conspicuous by its absence. Goldsmith boldly announces that we need “radical and urgent reform of our political system … to galvanise the people and rejuvenate democracy”, yet the one reform which would make the most difference is absent. Localism is promoted instead. Yet while popular referenda and recall systems are useful ways of generating greater engagement in the political process, to ignore the need for a fairer voting system seems perverse.
Throughout the book, Goldsmith builds a compelling case that the solutions to the environmental crisis exist, and all it requires is the political will to implement them. I agree – but is David Cameron’s Conservative party likely to oblige? Presumably Goldsmith believes it will – or he wouldn’t have chosen to be a Conservative candidate.
But while I admire his optimism, it’s hard to find much justification for it, when measured against the way most Tory politicians actually behave. Take his MEP colleagues: on just about all of the very sensible proposals Goldsmith makes – proposals which, I can’t resist pointing out, are championed by the Greens – Conservative members have consistently voted against. Whether it’s promoting a zero-waste strategy and higher emission standards for cars, for example, or a moratorium on all aviation expansion and a rejection of nuclear power, his Tory colleagues are stubbornly opposed to progress.
Despite all of this, The Constant Economy is a compelling read, and inspiring in its positive, solution-oriented focus. Whether Goldsmith will be given the latitude to pursue this agenda if the Conservatives win the next election is another question.

Some hope of end to stalemate over Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan tells UN

Hopes are rising for a potential end to the years of deadlock in the conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which is part of Azerbaijan’s territory but is occupied by Armenian forces, Azerbaijan has told the General Assembly’s high-level debate.

Google Earth launches climate simulator

Al Gore stars in promo video for new emissions scenario features developed by Google Earth to coincide with Copenhagen climate conference
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words should we afford Google Earth? Hours can be lost skydiving your way towards your favourite locations. Seeing somewhere you know so well from above provides valuable extra servings of knowledge and perspective.
It’s pleasing, therefore, to see Google announcing on its official blog that it has developed some nifty new features to coincide with the Copenhagen climate conference, now only a matter of weeks away.
In collaboration with the Danish government and others, we are launching a series of Google Earth layers and tours to allow you to explore the potential impacts of climate change on our planet and the solutions for managing it. Working with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we show on Google Earth the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century.
To help introduce us all to these features, Google has asked Al Gore – who acts as a “senior advisor” to the company – to provide the commentary on an accompanying video.
The search engine has also teamed up with CNN to establish a dedicated YouTube channel. Entitled “Raise Your Voice”, it features a series of videos by world leaders and well-known faces (Emma Thompson and the crown prince of Denmark, to date) to help explain why the conference is so important. Submissions from the public are welcome, and the best will be aired during the conference in the meeting rooms and on CNN.
I’ve had a quick play around with the new Google Earth features – they allow you to “view” any location on earth up till the year 2100, according to both the IPCC’s high and low emissions scenarios. You may be asked to install a plugin, as I was. Google promises more features in coming weeks.
By the looks of Al Gore’s video, we can expect additional versions allowing us to see predicted sea-level rises, water depletion and polar ice-sheet melting. Extra tours are promised that will help us “learn about the range of available solutions”. According to Gore, “you will visualise a new world of renewable energy, and see what individuals and communities around the world are doing to both reduce their carbon footprint and adapt to their changing climates”.
If Google can keep on adding tools and features, this could develop into something truly useful – particularly for schools.
And it would be nice, too, if the crowd-sourcing potential of Google Maps could somehow be exploited by users. What additional layers of information would you like to see? Predicted impacts on habitats? Likely spread of malaria endemic areas? Data showing variations in public attitudes to the threat of climate change? Regional increases (and decreases) in human population? The location of existing and planned nuclear power stations? Over to you.

UNESCO restores landmark headquarters complex in Paris

Officials have unveiled the landmark Paris headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which have just been restored in a €100 million project that aims to slash the complex’s energy consumption, improve security and introduce more modern technology.