HISTORY of human living harmoniously with the nature dates back to millennia; in recent times though, to the days of World War I (1914-18), severe consequences of which were amply demonstrated and felt through large-scale chaos, devastations and destruction lasting through to World War II (1939-1945).
These were critical years in evolution of multilateralism leading to one of the largest exercises designed to rebuild destroyed cities and urban centres in Europe, and the West, implications of which are still being experienced.
With World War II over, 1944 saw founding of Bretton Woods systems which gave the West and Europe a reason for peace, security and safeguarding the nature. The system brought to fore establishment of financial behemoths in the form and shape of International Monitory Fund (IMF) and the World Bank mandated to look after global financial volatility through robust monetary policies.
These policies were targeted to help create a stable financial regime that could aid development projects by supporting war-ravaged nations, which needed both foreign exchange stability and financial resources to build their infrastructure and economies.
Multilateral institutions
In 1945, with the United Nations (UN) established as a mother multilateral institution, other systems got subsumed within it to better align their actions and responses. From the initial days of the UN being set up, socio economic issues began to dominate the multilateral body through debates and discussions on prioritising environment and human development, Even though, the Swedish Government, right since the founding of the UN, continued to approach it for holding an international conference on sustainable development, such a request could not be accepted by the UN due to many other important agendas occupying the attention of the world body.
Finally in 1972, at the insistence of the Swedish Government, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment took place in Stockholm with participants adopting a series of principles for sound management of the environment as then seen as an outcome of human activities paving the pathway for establishing interdependence between the health of the environment as a precondition for human activities.
These stocktakes are adequately reflected in the Stockholm Declaration and Action Plan for the Human Environment. This declaration marked the start of the dialogue between industrialised and developing world on the link between economic growth, pollution of air, water, the oceans and welfare of the people around the world.
Sustainability evolution
This in the hindsight marked the evolution of sustainability as a notion, which in decades following the conference began to develop as an agenda mainstreaming human centric approaches to the growth and population scale wellbeing that were interlinked to one another around production and consumption patterns of consumer-centric market and profits nexus. From then onwards, sustainability also began to be defined in diverse context; while it was consumer-oriented societies in developed economies and at the foundational co-existence of people and nature in the developing world.
During 1980s though, climate change issues began to be visible and concerns began to be shown by scientists about the impending to follow. While science was moving forward to define the goal posts, not enough scientific discoveries had yet been made to conclude the issues around climate change beyond the knowledge of global warming occurring due to human activities over permissible limits, be it pollution on account of large-scale infrastructure and rebuilding activities in Europe and the West or sucking large quantities of groundwater for these reconstruction projects, among others.
Loss and consequences
By early 1990s, the science had built enough data sets, analysis and scenarios fit to predict the loss in natural assets and consequences that were likely to follow with impact on air, water, soil, oceans, agriculture including implications on human lives. Climate scientists were also challenged on extent of damage that the global warming was likely to cause and the quality of data they generated.
More importantly, oil, gas and coal companies contested scientific claims on carbon emissions versus their contribution to warming. And, this continued until such times that there was a consensus on the nature of problem and ways to combat them was decided through adaptation and mitigation strategies multilaterally.
In the period from 2000 and thereafter, science was clear and scenarios were vetted by international scientific community and multilateral institutions with clear understanding on not just to find resilient ways to combat climate change, but also to deploy (adaptation and mitigation) strategies. These included fixing ceilings on production and consumption activities, especially in hard-to-abate sectors identified causing the worst harm to the environment and climate by their contribution to carbon emissions. (To be continued…) (The writer is International Vi
