The climate emergency and the irremediable tragedy that threatens the Earth transcend state borders and force us to redefine the means of coordination and reconciliation between sovereign states. More than ever, negotiation and mediation are essential in the design of our intervention models.
We have passed the stage of immediacy. We are on the verge of moving beyond the state of emergency, because it is now a question of the survival of living species.
Day after day, the effects of climate action manifest themselves to the point where we get used to them like a succession of news items. As if the fatality of the disaster now inhabited the collective unconscious of the inhabitants of the Earth.
Resource extraction has tripled in the past 30 years, and 70% of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels. Carbon emissions continue to rise, temperatures are hotter than ever, and bush and forest fires are setting the continents ablaze. Melting glaciers herald immeasurable flooding, and the oceans have become the receptacle for 8.8 million tonnes of plastic each year. According to the UN Environment Agency, within a few decades, there will be more plastic than fish in the seas.
The permafrost of the arctic and boreal regions contains between 1,460 and 1,700 billion tonnes of carbon, not counting the viruses and bacteria which, once released by the melting glaciers, will cause health disasters.
2021 will undoubtedly be the most important year for the climate. It will be where theTonnus horribilis or the year of redemption by reviewing the commitments of countries made in the Paris Agreement. We still have a choice.
In December 2015, the parties reached a landmark agreement, the Paris Agreement, which remains the cornerstone of countries’ climate orientation.
However, there is as yet no international environmental tribunal or enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance with agreements that remain voluntary commitments by countries.
Reach consensus
It is urgently necessary to change the ways in which consensus is reached and that agreements are respected.
Collaboration and cooperation will have to be accentuated with disproportionate and extraordinary efficiency in order to create new avenues of access to a global social contract. The first without doubt.
The time has come to include the major mediators in global environmental negotiations. We no longer have the luxury of endless face-to-face negotiations as we have been doing for 30 years. The environmental crisis we are experiencing is complex and dynamic. We cannot remain tied to traditional negotiation methods, which are no longer adapted to the evolving context of the global climate crisis.
Since the end of the 1970s, enlightened by a solid empirical path and nourished by the reflection of legal thinkers, we have known that mediation covers a transcendent phenomenon in the history of modern law. Mediation is ultimately a re-foundation of informal justice.
In 2016, I was invited to the launch of a book dedicated to environmental mediation: The guide for mediators facing environmental conflicts. Designed and published by UNEP (the United Nations Environment Agency), this guide is intended for professional mediators. It describes the case studies carried out in countries afflicted by environmental disasters, on all continents. You don’t improvise as a mediator. Mediation is a profession and sometimes an art.
However, the UNEP guide reads: ” […] Despite its promise, mediation has been under-used by the international system in addressing disputes over natural resources […]. The international system still lags behind in acting on opportunities for proactive use of mediation as a tool […]. “
Catch up
We must now make up for lost time in face-to-face negotiations led by opposing parties. We have no more time for unnecessary and redundant words, negotiations based on firm positions and concessions that stretch for months.
We need to create a team of leading environmental mediators to tackle the next decade, tax mediators to negotiate the international tax contribution; field mediators, assisted by scientists, for the relocation of populations displaced by cataclysms, in territories often hostile to their arrival; and governance mediators for coordination between states and with businesses. It’s essential. A strong, mobile and strategic team that works and moves in real time. Now.
I think of the populations who are displaced as I write these lines and those who will be this year and over the next decade. Climate refugees are now the human face of climate change. Oxfam shows that climate change disasters have been the main driver of internal displacement over the past decade, forcing more than 20 million people a year from their homes.
Whether we like it or not, we are all together in a conflict with planet Earth and we are going to have to redefine our relationship to the world with humility. And above all to rediscover, with amplitude, solidarity and sharing.
We are now irreparably linked for decades to come. In this sense, Albert Jacquard wrote: “I am the links that I weave with others. “
In the language of the Algonquins, one of the First Nations of Quebec, we say Mamidosewin, which means: “We are all walking together towards a common destination. This destination leads us to the protection of our habitat, the Earth, for those who will follow us.