by Sheila Doucet, AAWE Paris and Environment Team Co-Chair
I was asked a curious question the other day: “How frequently do you read about THE ENVIRONMENT – often, rarely, never?” (the capital letters are mine because I heard the question as if it had been TWEETED).
I must admit, I was stumped. I “hear” about the environment constantly, because it is everywhere and appears in myriad forms: the good, the bad and the yet-to-be-seen in-between.
The Good: Scientists note that the hole in the ozone is closing.1 When governments decide to switch to alternative technologies, they can indeed enact swift, comprehensive and just policy changes.
The Bad: Although the mechanism to channel international funding to assist Pakistan’s reconstruction is slowly materializing,2 millions of Pakistanis’ lives remain upended due to last year's floods.3 Many countries who, like Pakistan, are among the least responsible for causing historic levels of carbon emissions, are already suffering devastating effects today.
The Yet-to-Be-Seen In-Between: The recent lawsuit brought by three environmental groups against the French company Danone for its use of plastics in its packaging.4 Regardless of the outcome of this suit, the trend is clear. Producers across industries will increasingly face negative financial consequences if they do NOT factor in the “true” costs of their sourcing, production and delivery processes on the environment.
However, once we read it, how do we integrate that information into our daily lives? Is it enough to “refuse, reduce, recycle, reuse and repurpose”? To adopt “Meatless Mondays”?
We as consumers are put in a tight existential chokehold. Our individual actions DO indeed make a difference, so I am not letting anyone off the hook. Our daily choices reflect our values, our pocketbooks and our faith in the future. We literally put our money where our mouths are as we do our grocery shopping. Assuming we have already dramatically shifted away from a high-octane lifestyle and actually ask ourselves before every purchase “do I need this?” versus “do I want this – and why?”, we must also realize that the quality and quantity of the products and services offered are often simply out of our hands. We can actually only consume that which is available to us. As hard as I look, I have yet to find a washing machine that boasts – and delivers – like the Maytag ads of yore (“The Maytag Repairman, the loneliest man in the world”). The offers we have depend upon government policy and the choices companies consciously make based on fiscal, regulatory, philosophical policies (for instance, maximizing shareholder dividends).
Which leads us to the importance of the Conference of the Parties. COP is the annual meeting of nations – or in UN lingo, Parties – to negotiate the mechanism of how the international community will take collective action to rectify the harm human activity has had on the climate, especially since the industrial revolution. The UN provides the platform within which each Party participates. By engaging in negotiations and agreeing to the adopted tenets, governments fulfill their fundamental role of defining how they act as internationally responsible partners. Ideally, they ratify and enact domestic laws that support these agreements. Members of civil society – such as FAWCO, through our recognized affiliation with the UN – are also invited to COP in order to lift up the voices of underrepresented constituencies and to advocate positions which otherwise would have been overlooked. It is therefore our role and responsibility to remind the Parties that a range of constituencies exist and to explain how the impact of specific policies will impact the stability, cohesion and values of our own societies.
We live in a world where we are inundated with “environment-related news.” Thankfully so. As individuals, as members of whichever community we define ourselves as belonging to and as a species, we are The Environment.
Sources:
1) https://www.nasa.gov/esnt/2022/ozone-hole-continues-shrinking-in-2022-nasa-and-noaa-scientists-say/
3) https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/devastating-floods-pakistan-2022
4) https://www.packaging-gateway.com/news/danone-plastic-lawsuit/
All photos taken by the author at COP 27 in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt.
