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PAYING THE PRICE OF IGNORING THE VALUE

CIWEM Executive Director, Nick Reeves, says governments seem to think that actions on the symptoms of a warming world will win the war on climate change. . . Big mistake.

As the UK Government prepares its promised legislation on climate change and sets targets for reducing carbon emissions, it must resist the temptation to subsume policies on the environment in the fight against global warming.  That this could happen is a real possibility and would be a big mistake. With the world spooked increasingly by the impact of greenhouse gas emissions and the terrifying predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the future of the planet, our leaders must get the strategy right first time.

We seem to have lost sight of the fact that climate change is a symptom of the disease and not the disease itself. There is a real worry that if we just treat the symptom, the underlying causes will remain. There is a cancer eating away at the vital parts of the planet, and it is rooted in mankind's failure to value the resources that sustain us, while hell-bent on a mad kind of 'me, me' consumerism. It is, as the Stern Report pointed out, market failure on a massive scale over many years that haunts us now with the spectre of a world in free-fall.

It is, sadly, part of what we are and our culture that we can put a price on almost everything except the things that really matter. We say frequently that health, happiness and contentment, and so many other non-material factors, are 'priceless', and yet we take them for granted, only to be missed when they are not there or when they are threatened. Then their priceless importance to our lives comes into sharp focus. It hasn't always been that way, and neither need it be now.

In the drive for growth and higher gross domestic product we know that these things are outside a traditional pricing structure that an economist would understand. And while we have learned to live with that - since Adam was a lad - we also recognise the conflicts it imposes: in our struggle for work/life balance and our concern with well-being, a good quality of life and gross domestic happiness. These are considerations that attempt to address the mismatch between what can be priced - what we earn, the things we own, and the capital materials we use - and what we acknowledge to be priceless.

What is new to us is the realisation that there is another category of really big things on which we do not put a price, things we have raided and abused consistently with no account taken of their cost. It is only now, when that cost has assumed proportions to the point at which we breach environmental limits and endanger our ability to survive, that we have been scared rigid by the enormity of the debt. The rivers, aquifers and waterways that provide our water, the air we breathe, the sea that surrounds us, the trees and plants that affect our climate, the soils for food - everything we hold in common for the benefit of all living things. All of these things we take for granted as an unpriced resource with no thought for their future health or stewardship.  Yet they are all part of the equation of life which  depends on the complex interconnection of things - an interconnection  bent out of shape by climate change.  

And therein lies the problem, the biggest challenge we face, the culture of individualism that assumes the right of personal choice. And while the right to choose has made life so much better for so many people, it has also meant that we have forgotten what tribal societies know so well. Consequently, we now find it very hard to accept that our private consumption and 'me, me' values can have a terrible effect on the health of the planet, and therefore us. Indeed, it is part of the problem of globalisation that it encourages the individual to believe that his and her actions do not matter because they can't change things. We frequently speak of the global village but haven't relearned what the village knew so very well - the huge damage that each one of us causes.

But, just as the global problem is the result  of the sum of individual actions, so the global solution will depend on small changes by billions of individuals. All of those changes will derive from our learning again that we are all interdependent and our choices and our actions must reflect that. Once we understand that we are all in this together we stand a chance. As Marshall McLuhan once said: 'There are no passengers on spaceship Earth, we're all crew.'

But, we must be well organised and well led. Local, regional, national and global institutions - public, voluntary and private - have to create the conditions in which it is easiest for us to act and consume in a way that recognises the value of all the planet's resources, and nurtures and protects them.  Accepting our individual responsibility for the common good doesn't mean that we don't also recognise the value of corporate action. Indeed, once we understand the interrelation of all things and the pervasive nature of the eco-system, the case for common action becomes absolutely irresistable. Our responsibility as individual citizens is to act in unison. After all, our misuse, our profligacy and our pollution is common, as well as individual.

And because it breaches geographical boundaries and the borders of sovereign nations there is no way we can solve these problems anytime soon unless the climate-sceptics, the selfish and the spend, spend, spenders alter their thinking and their behaviour. 

So, although we need new global institutions for collective action on the drive to value the planet's resources properly, the means to get the work underway are already in place. We can recover individual and local responsibility for our use of resources. We can achieve and extend that by a regulatory and incentivising regime laid down by government. And we can make that possible by using the reach of the EU to change the way in which the world's commerce works.

However, all of this does demand that we look beyond the crisis caused by climate change and concentrate on its cause. Global warming has happened because human beings have failed to value what matters most that sustains us - water, land and air. Only by paying the price that will sustain our environment can we hope to survive.