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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on October 2nd, 2012 We need a conservation ethic, because we must become a light burden on our host, the planet earth. To have a sustainable economy the old work-ethic must share space with a new conservation-ethic.Basing the economy on Job creation and thus a push to growth is being questioned in the following articles. The first article we received directly from David Brooks and we thought it very timely considering the ongoing US Presidential campaigns. Is it possible that these campaigns are blind to the needs for a higher degree of Sustainability in the 21st century? Do we need a quantum jump in our thinking about the world and ourselves? - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -The Last Resort in Economics.
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on October 2nd, 2012 This article makes no mention of the change of direction that occurred in Rio – the fact that Sustainable Development today has to be understood in terms of the Brundtland Commission Sustainability which is the bridge to Future Generations. The above was the clear outcome of Rio 2012 and it must be taken into account that in the future funds will be available only if there is the understanding that Development must be SUSTAINABLE and the process is rather one of DEVELOPING SUSTAINABILITY. We look forward to see clear statements on this from our friend Martin Khor who we are sure realizes the difference between this and the call for funds for growth in countries of underdevelopment. The sins of the Developed World are clear – but the sins of the underdeveloped States must be recognized as well. ==============
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on October 1st, 2012 from: Prof. Walter Leal lealfilho at yahoo.com ![]() Sustainable Development at Universities: New Horizons
It pursues the following main aims: to document and disseminate experiences from universities all round the world regarding education for sustainable development; See the video from WSSD-U-2012 at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT8byPic8jQ ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on October 1st, 2012
The Rio Conventions Pavilion (RCP) is a platform for raising awareness and sharing information about the latest practices and scientific findings on the co-benefits that can be realized through integrated approaches in implementation of the three Rio conventions – on Biodiversity, on Desertification and Arid lands, on Climate Change. The RCP is a collaborative effort between the Secretariats of the three Rio conventions and the Global Environment Facility, involving a growing list of other global and national partners. Moving forward from Rio+20 to Hyderabad, a full daily programme of events will be hosted in the RCP for the duration of CBD COP11, addressing themes relevant to the objectives of the three Rio conventions. The programme is attached, and available at www.riopavilion.org/india/. Themes include: 9 Oct: Towards Integrated Science, Assessments and Monitoring for the Rio Conventions (DIVERSITAS, IAI, CI) We invite you to join in the discussions, contribute your ideas and knowledge, and learn about the latest science and best practices related to the implementation of the conventions. The Rio Conventions Pavilion is located in the Novotel Hotel ballroom, connected via a walkway to the CBD COP11 venue in the Hyderabad International Conference Centre. Coverage of events will also be available through ENB and Climate Change TV – please check back on the RCP website www.riopavilion.org for programme updates and media coverage. With best regards, Veronica Ms. Veronica Lo Science, Technical and Technological Matters Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity Tel: +1 514 764 6366 Fax: +1 514 288 6588 ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on September 25th, 2012 President Clinton Opened 2012 Annual Meeting, Emphasizing Action.New York City, Sunday, September 23, 2012 President Clinton Opened 2012 Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting Emphasizing Action through Social Investment, Empowering Girls and Women, and Designing for Impact Featured speakers included Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, IDEO Chief Executive Officer Tim Brown, and Walmart President and CEO Michael T. Duke New commitments focusing on environmental protection, women’s empowerment, sustainable energy and global health and progress reports on previous commitments announced. {On Fareed Zakaria’s CNN/GPS show this morning, President Clinton announced that Walmart is a major producer, and user in its operations of Photovoltaic solar power and wind-mill power – globally.} New York, NY – Today, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, and Walmart President and CEO Michael T. Duke joined President Bill Clinton and other global leaders in New York City at the opening of the eighth Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. Over the course of the three-day meeting, pioneers and innovators from business, government, and civil society will examine the most effective ways to design a more prosperous and sustainable world and confront the most urgent global challenges. “As CGI’s eighth Annual Meeting begins, I am deeply grateful that such a diverse group of esteemed leaders are here with us to motivate global action and change lives worldwide,” said President Clinton. “Their dedication reminds us that the international demand for solutions must take priority over the differences that divide us. It’s the same dedication to humanity that has helped CGI members make nearly 2,300 commitments that have impacted the lives of more than 400 million people since 2005. In the next three days, I look forward to seeing how the world’s leading thinkers will propose creative and inclusive solutions to the obstacles facing our planet.” This year’s theme, “Designing for Impact,” focuses on the capacity of global citizens to cultivate an environment where their lives and the systems they utilize can serve as an effective vehicle for change. Through this theme, participants will convey how innovation and creativity can transform into platforms for global action. Each day of the Annual Meeting, CGI members will use a different lens to approach designing their work for impact from the empowerment of women and girls to social investment. President Clinton moderated the opening panel featuring Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, and Walmart President and CEO Michael T. Duke, who discussed how we can better design our world to cultivate greater opportunity and equality. The conversation followed opening remarks from IDEO CEO Tim Brown, whose cutting-edge ideas on design have influenced the meeting’s creative focus this year. In addition to moderating the discussion in the plenary session, President Clinton announced new commitments for 2012 and reports on progress of commitments made at past CGI Annual Meetings. The 2012 CGI Annual Meeting is sponsored by Abraaj Capital, American Federation of Teachers, Ambassador Gianna Angelopoulos, APCO Worldwide, Barclays, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cisco, CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, Crédit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank, Delos Living, Deutsche Bank, Diageo PLC, The Dow Chemical Company, Duke Energy Corporation, ExxonMobil, The Ford Foundation, Varkey GEMS Foundation, The Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, Hewlett Packard Company, Inter-American Development Bank, InterEnergy, Jive Software, Knoll Inc, Laureate International Universities, Microsoft Corporation, NRG Energy Inc, Procter & Gamble, The Rockefeller Foundation, Shangri-La Industries, Standard Chartered Bank, Starkey Hearing Foundation, Swiss Reinsurance Company, Tom Golisano, Toyota Motors Corporation, United Postcode Lotteries, The Victor Pinchuk Foundation, and Western Union Financial Services Inc. The full program, webcast schedule, and list of all CGI Annual Meeting commitments are available here: clintonglobalinitiative.org/2012. The following new commitments were announced today in plenary sessions: GIVE: Lights and Power for Panzi Hospital Health Justice for People with Intellectual Disabilities Empowering Palestinian Women In and Through Media Bridging the Gap: Empowering Women Through Education Man Up Congo: Youth Ending Violence Against Girls in Schools ————– The following progress reports were announced today in plenary sessions: P&G Children’s Safe Drinking Water: Save a Life an Hour Avon Foundation Global Breast Cancer Clinical Scholars Addressing Sexual Violence Against Girls Dream Builder: The Women’s Business Creator ### September 25, 2012 - THE CLOSING DAY. We post material as we obtained from his public relations’ office. and had to forget about an attempt at direct interviews at this time. We had better success in past years but are yet to be able to authenticate success on the ground of projects we posted. On this last day, likted in New York by the onset of the Jewish Yom Kippur – President Clinton Hosts President Barack Obama, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, and Governor Mitt Romney on Closing Day of 2012 Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting. Eighth CGI Annual Meeting Closes with over 150 new commitments made valued at more than $2 billion, expected to impact nearly 22 million people. Members have now made nearly 2,300 commitments, which will improve the lives of over 400 million people in more than 180 countries First CGI Latin America established. CGI University, CGI America dates announced. New York, NY – Today, President Barack Obama, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney joined President Clinton and other international leaders on the final day of the eighth Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting. Over three days, an array of heads of state, CEOs, non-profit leaders, and other global luminaries made over 150 new commitments, expected to impact nearly 22 million lives. To close the meeting, President Clinton and Chelsea Clinton announced plans for CGI University, CGI America, and the first CGI Latin America Meeting in 2013. “I am convinced that cooperation, not conflict, will define this century,” said President Clinton. “From the capitols of the world to the most remote villages, people everywhere understand that there are universal challenges which face us all and are beyond the power of any individual to solve alone. As the eighth CGI Annual Meeting draws to a close, I celebrate our members who have committed to working together to meet these challenges head on. Their creative and focused actions will help to bring about a stable, sustainable world in which all people have a chance to thrive.” The day’s theme, “Designing Our Systems,” emphasized that our interconnected world requires intentional systems of governance, community welfare, and commerce in order to create economic growth and provide for the social good. In the day’s sessions, CGI members examined tools and approaches used to design systems that enable sustainable prosperity and opportunity for all. Clinton Foundation and CGI board member Chelsea Clinton moderated a session called “The Case for Optimism in the 21st Century.” Following President Clinton’s conversation with President Morsi, Chelsea joined President Clinton to announce details for CGI University 2013. Washington University in St. Louis will serve as next year’s site for the gathering that brings students, youth organizations, topic experts, and celebrities together to explore innovative solutions to pressing global challenges. The meeting will take place April 5-7, 2013 and convene more than 1,000 students representing approximately 300 colleges and universities around the world. President Clinton revealed that CGI will hold CGI Latin America in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil next year in December. It marks the Clinton Global Initiative’s first overseas meeting since convening CGI Asia in Hong Kong in 2008. President Clinton also announced that CGI America, a meeting focused on collaborative solutions to economic recovery in the United States, will return to Chicago in June 2013. Last night, President Clinton also honored this year’s recipients of the Clinton Global Citizen Award: Featured speakers on the closing day of the Annual Meeting included The 2012 CGI Annual Meeting is sponsored by Abraaj Capital, American Federation of Teachers, Ambassador Gianna Angelopoulos, APCO Worldwide, Barclays, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cisco, CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, Crédit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank, Delos Living, Deutsche Bank, Diageo PLC, The Dow Chemical Company, Duke Energy Corporation, ExxonMobil, The Ford Foundation, Varkey GEMS Foundation, The Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, Hewlett Packard Company, Inter-American Development Bank, InterEnergy, Jive Software, Knoll Inc, Laureate International Universities, Microsoft Corporation, NRG Energy Inc, Procter & Gamble, The Rockefeller Foundation, Shangri-La Industries, Standard Chartered Bank, Starkey Hearing Foundation, Swiss Reinsurance Company, Tom Golisano, Toyota Motors Corporation, United Postcode Lotteries, The Victor Pinchuk Foundation, and Western Union Financial Services Inc. The full program, webcast schedule, and list of all CGI Annual Meeting commitments are available here: clintonglobalinitiative.org/2012. The following new commitments were announced in Plenary Sessions today: NGO 2.0 Shaping the Next Generation of Social Entrepreneurs Rwanda Human Resources for Health Program 20 x 20: To Serve 20 Million People by 2020 Post Harvest Project: Reducing Waste for Food Security mHealth From the Ground Up in Rural Liberia Agri-Fin Mobile: Increasing Small-holder Income Through Mobile In Women’s Hands: Empowering the Next Generation of African Female Leaders Brighter Futures: Ending Child Marriage in Turkey and Abroad Next Generation Technology for Frontline Health Workers A Budding Interest: Organic Farming Essential Capital Fund United Water ‘Solution’: Investing in America’s Water Establishment of the Shared Value Initiative Building a Global Movement to Redefine Success in Business The following progress reports were announced in Plenary Sessions today: General Mills/PEPFAR/USAID Partnership for Food Security Pollinator Habitat Improvement Girls Not Brides: Partnership to End Child Marriage Developing MFI Social Performance Scorecard & Ratings Western Union’s Our World, Our Family Program Medical Supply Chain Transformation Project ### About the Clinton Global Initiative CGI also convenes CGI America, a meeting focused on collaborative solutions to economic recovery in the United States, and CGI University (CGI U), which brings together undergraduate and graduate students to address pressing challenges in their community or around the world. For more information, visit clintonglobalinitiative.org and follow us on Twitter @ClintonGlobal and Facebook at facebook.com/clintonglobalinitiative. ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on September 21st, 2012 From Brazil and Peru, Disparate Internet Bills Under Consideration.Rachel Glickhouse, for Americas Society September 20, 2012
The explosion of Internet use in Latin America means a new set of threats for consumers and the need to address their online safety and rights. In both Brazil and Peru, Internet use increased roughly 30 percent over the past five years. With two bills making their way through national legislatures, Brazil and Peru’s lawmakers could take diametrically opposed steps on Internet freedoms. Brazil’s Congress will soon vote on a bill to protect Internet consumers while Peru evaluates legislation that would change the penal code to include online crimes. In Brazil, what some dubbed the “world’s first Internet bill of rights” is slowly winding its way through Congress. Called the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, the bill was due for a vote on September 19, but after a postponement a new vote will take place following the October 7 municipal elections. Using research done through public hearings and online consultations with the public, the bill outlines rights for Internet users, thus providing a legal framework for future laws on Internet-based crimes and copyright infringement. Guilherme Varella, a lawyer from the Brazilian Institute for Consumer Protection, praised the bill, saying: “[Users will know] that their personal data will be protected, their privacy will not be violated, what they will be free to browse and that they will not see their connection degraded (with a slow speed) without justification.” The law originated in 2009, when the Ministry of Justice’s Secretariat for Legislation and the Getulio Vargas Foundation conducted a study exploring a legal framework for the Internet, asking for input from citizens online. The bill enjoys support from three of Brazil’s most popular websites, as well as dozens of Brazilian and international civil rights organizations. While Dilma Rousseff’s administration supports the bill, the government wants to ensure new language on net neutrality won’t change. This means the law would ensure Internet service providers and governments cannot restrict users’ access to content, websites, or Internet-based services, nor can they interfere with how consumers use the Internet. If the bill passes, Brazil will become the first South American country to guarantee net neutrality. The bill also protects website owners, saying they are not responsible for user-generated content. However, Brazil’s attorney general wants to change text to ensure the bill fully protects “consumers, children, and teens.” Peru’s Congress may follow quite a different path—one some say could lead to privacy violations. Last year, it began work on legislation to combat cybercrime, targeting offenses like bank fraud and child pornography. The Computer Crimes Bill, which would alter the country’s penal code, would “essentially eliminate anonymity online, force companies to comply with government requests for user data, and put average Internet users at risk of imprisonment for their online activities,” writes Access Now, a digital watchdog site. One of the bill’s authors, Congressman Juan Carlos Eguren, defended the legislation, saying: “It’s everything that’s opposite to taking away privacy. It’s to protect and punish those who use electronic ways to violate rights, to gain information.” One of the most controversial parts of the law, Article 23, allows the police to demand personal data—including name, home address, phone number, and IP address—from Internet service providers within a 48-hour period and without a warrant. Unlike Brazil’s Internet bill, legislators created the Peruvian bill without consulting the public. Some critics also say that the crimes listed are vague, such as “informational fraud,” and that jail times seem arbitrary. As a result, the bill was protested in Peru. Over 5,000 people sent letters to Congress. An open letter to legislators from 15 Peruvian and international organizations denounced the bill, saying “the creation of new crimes that are not sufficiently clear and narrowly applied can affect citizens’ constitutional rights to legal due process, privacy, and freedom of expression, among others.” ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on September 18th, 2012
On this website we had several postings from Rio and we followed closely the preparations for the Conference, but the following was posted in the Society for International Development (SID) e-book. ebookbrowse.com/pincas-jawetz-pdf… ———– THE POST RIO+20 NEW ERA AT THE UNITED NATIONS starts with a RIO+20 new attempt to develop a practice of sustainability. The next climate and development game will be played September 2012 on the UN General Assembly court.
This article by Pincas Jawetz, based on a posting on www.SustainabiliTank.info, analyzes the preparations to the Conference, Rio at the time of the June 2012 Conference, and further meetings in Vienna held as part of the 54 International Congress of Americanists (ICA) that involved meetings we were not able to attend in Rio. Vienna, Austria: July 28, 2012 We picked up at Rio a button that said – “STEP UP AGENDA 21 – RIO+21″ (??) and we wondered if those that issued this button were listening to what was being said in the Conference at large. The honest truth was that AGENDA 21 was not in sight. The reality is that a RIO+21 must indeed be the launching pad of what the UN 67th General Assembly opening Statements of September 18th to October 1st 2012 must be ready to divine – and this might be something different from the outcome of the Rio Conference of 1992. It is therefore of real importance for the Heads of Delegations to prepare for the potential offered at the upcoming UN General Assembly. The “FUTURE WE WANT” MANDATES THE UN SECRETARY GENERAL to start the process at UNGA 67 in order to have proposals ready in place for UNGA 68. Interesting, material that reached us from the UN, does not mention the Commission on Sustainable Development, to be closed and lessons from the CSD to be passed to a new element to result from the deliberations of a Universal Membership High Level Political Forum. The fact that it is passed over in silence means to us that forces at the UN may still hope to undo above Rio decision. – 1992 was specially a good year – the break?up of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, surely to different degrees, and on the other hand, Europe started out on an experiment of unification that emerged from a century of internal warfare, two World Wars, and the Marshall Plan revitalizing its Nation States. UNCED in 1992 seized on the 1987 Brundtland Commission’s Sustainable Development concept, and Maurice Strong, present everywhere, since the 1972 Conference on the Human Environment, was able to maneuver the topic of Sustainability – the concept that bridges between our deeds now, and the needs of future generations, to the point that developing countries All countries never measured up to the responsibility to future generations. In the US, 1992 was the year of the emergence of strong Democratic leadership in Congress – to the point that Rio saw two separate US delegations – The official delegation, and the Senate delegation with Al Gore and Timothy Wirth holding the reins. Europe had two delegations ? the one anchored in the freshly signed Maastricht agreement for those countries that will be the first batch of EU member States, and the other group made up of Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Both of these groups were ready to link to the Al Gore US group, and the visions of conference leader Maurice Strong and Minister Klaus Toepfer, working for Germany, in order to shape up at Rio 1992 a UN position on the run. The BRICS were not yet strongly positioned on the map, and he G77 where ready to accept the idea that money might come their way. But now in RIO of 2012, Mr. Maurice Strong said that what we need to talk about is DEVELOPING SUSTAINABILITY meaning the understanding that Sustainability is about the future generations rather then development for profit in our times. There was no RIO+20 Outcome Document. What helped the UN in 2012 was the emergence of UN “TEAM B” – the States of Bhutan and Brazil – to lead it out of the TOHU VAVOHU in New York and at Rio. The Prime Minister of Bhutan and his aids introduced notions of substance – “Well?Being and Happiness,” while the whole Administration of Brazil, President, Foreign Minister, the Diplomatic frontman and his large staff, taught us the potential of “Olympic Diplomacy” – a kind of Kissingerian diplomacy to provide something to every participant – so when an agreement is reached pro-forma there was not even a single loser – everyone claimed he had something he won – nobody got in full what he was bargaining for. The Brazilian “COMMON VISION” when accepted by all UN Member States, was unchanged from the Brazilian paper, then renamed by the UN “The Future We Want” in line of previous releases from the UN. This was not in backing of the “Vision,” but rather in attempt to forget the Vision – and stress from the document the points close to official UN positions. In due time, nevertheless, some Member State will ask the UNSG to act according to the Brazil sponsored Vision, so we do not worry about mailings that we receive and that deviate from above. In our opinion – it was paragraphs 84-86 of the Brazilian “Our Common Vision” – that became the UN’s “Our Common Future” – that include the essence of the potential of progress starting with the UN General Assembly – September 2012. But it seems that those paragraphs, the reference to Future Generations, and the reevaluation at the UN General Assembly of Sustainable Development, are missing in reporting to home base, in the major Press, and in evaluations by NGOs, as if rewritten from official UN Press releases. I was at five debriefings held in Vienna – one was “Rio+20: Conference with meaning for Development and Environment?” The panel included Mr. Werner Raza, Head of the Austrian Research Foundation for International Development OEFSE, Mr. Alexander Egitt, Director of Greenpeace Austria, and Daniel Bacher, Spokesman for the Advocacy for Africa at the DKA – all members of the official Austrian Government delegation to the Rio Conference. At another debriefing called by Professor Otmar Hoell of the Austrian Institute for International Policy OIIP, Mr. Schoffman, Vienna representative of the Global Compact, and from the floor Dr. Leo Gabriel, an anthropologist and Journalist, added that there was more to Rio then the official meeting. There were agreements in the side events – in the business area and also in the Peoples Sustainability Treaties. Mr. Gabriel spoke of the “La Cupula dos Povos” – the Alternate Meeting at Rio that was apart from the official meeting and involved indigenous people. Then at the other end of the strip, green entrepreneurs displayed sustainable business ideas. On July 14th there was the last debriefing of this series ? “How do we go on from Rio+20?”? about the campaign against the “Green Economy.” These speakers believe that much has happened at RIO+20, but this happened not at the official meeting but at the meetings of the business people. Some of these meetings were neither advertised nor open to non-invited guests. They believe that a Green Economy is a business concept to give quantified value to nature so it can be monetized and sold as if it were a commodity. They reject the notion that it is supposed to improve human life while achieving an economic shift by resource efficiency and decoupling growth & resource use. Their argument is that clean air and snow on a mountain are there and must be preserved – period – not because they have a financial value. They saw in Rio future Commodification of Nature, while on the other hand there were people that came to protest the above. Iara was a coordinator of THE PEOPLE’s SUMMIT – and she told us that the Brazilian government provided some $5 million to help organize their meeting– albeit far away (35 km. away) from the official site of the RioCentro. Iara Pitricovsky, co-director, the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies in Brazilia, participated in meetings with the UN Secretary-General and told him that it was frustrating to see the limping process. Twenty years ago we were at the top of neo-liberalism and Agenda 21 – we tried to build it and failed. Part of the ideas from the Peoples’ Meeting reached Vienna July 15-20, 2012, with the 54th International Congress of Americanists (ICA) and made it clear – it is more complicated then we are thinking with our old search for development. At the July 14th debriefing, obviously already part of ICA, Edgardo Lander, Universidad Central de Venezuela and Transnational Institute, Amsterdam, who at the ICA meeting co-chaired with the University of Vienna Ulrich Brand, on Thursday, July 19th the Symposium on Democratization and Transformation Perspectives, spoke on the language issue – new things start with new language. Critical economics started with things that did not take into account externalities, now the issue is this new commodification of nature. We need a defense of the Commons, of Mother Earth ? different from the valorization of everything. Our actions have consequences – the planet has limits – the corporations have concluded that they have to take this into account, translated – green sector will produce greater profits then the brown sector. The World Bank thinks of the value of bees in fertilization of plants to be turned into bonds and sold on the market. Jutta Kill of Fern UK, picked up at the business meeting she attended the phrase – “WE WILL TREASURE WHAT WE MEASURE” and says that this will be the new mantra of business in the effort to commodify nature. We see also a potential similarity between the Buddhist Bhutan stand and the indigenous people of Latin America. The Prime Minister of Bhutan, Jigmi Yoezer Thinley , with a large entourage of Ministers and Officials held a special meeting with the UNGA, on April 2nd, 2012, on Well Being and Happiness as targets of intent when talking about Sustainability and Sustainable Development. —– New alliances are possible – such as between countries, mainly in the poor South, that are already suffering from effects of climate change, and more visionary countries of the North, that have a civil society ready to switch gears in the economy and move to new industries that are less polluting, resources saving and create jobs – a win?win?win situation for all! But the structure of the UN is itself fossilized, and the RIO+20 Prepcom was frozen. Led by Foreign Minister Antonio de Aguilar Patriota, a Former Brazil Ambassador to the United States (2007-2009), and chief operational Ambassador Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado, the Undersecretary for Environment, Energy, Science and Technology of the Ministry of External Relations of Brazil – Figueredo Machado with 30 other Ambassadors and Ministers – made sure to speak to everybody who volunteered an opinion, and note the minimums of acceptance in a secret draft. Brazil, to play it safe, prepared also a second defence-line around the Rio+20 negotiations. I enjoyed in New York the resistance of Ambassador Figueiredo Machado to accept the idea that the meeting should actually be called RIO-20 because of the need, at the end, to come up with a new paradigm to replace the Agenda 21 that nobody was talking about. BrazilDialogues was the second line of defense organized by Mr. Machado. We have much more on this in our full text. Please read it there. Eventually, a set of recommendations resulted from this second process and they will be attached to the outcome document. —- Repeating what we see as the main point – please follow us to paragraphs 84-86 of the Rio Outcome Document, which have the secondary heading: “HIGH LEVEL POLITICAL FORUM.” We pick only a few most telling points: # 84. We decide to establish a universal intergovernmental high level political forum, building on the strengths, experiences, resources and inclusive participation modalities of the Commission on Sustainable Development, and subsequently replacing the Commission. The high level political forum shall follow up on the implementation of sustainable development and should avoid overlap with existing structures, bodies and entities in a cost?effective manner. # 86. We decide to launch an intergovernmental and open, transparent and inclusive negotiation process under the General Assembly to define the high level forum’s format and organizational aspects with the aim of convening the first high level forum at the beginning of the 68th session of the General Assembly. We will also consider the need for promoting intergenerational solidarity for the achievement of sustainable development, taking into account the needs of future generations, including by inviting the Secretary General to present a report on this issue. – What above means is that the UN Secretary Generals is mandated to establish under UN General Assembly rules, that call for full UN Membership:
(2) though leaving the term Sustainable Development in place, the above looks at Developing Sustainability instead – this by mandating the UN Secretary General to look at taking into account the needs of future generations — “including by inviting the Secretary General to present a report on this issue.” – – To summarize – RIO+20 as handled by Brazil – is a door to a new future that is going to rewrite the 1992 decisions that were not followed anyway. As said – it will be rather DEVELOPING SUSTAINABILITY then SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, and in this respect the platform is only being developed, and the eventual funding will be forthcoming with South?South cooperation. We will have to be patient and see the changes taking effect. But this will happen only if governments remind the UN Secretary General of the outcome document’s specific language and ask for his acting accordingly — on he rights of the un-conceived yet — THE FUTURE GENERATIONS. ———————————————————- At Rio+20 he headed the delegation of WAFUNIF – The World Association of Former UN Interns and Fellows. For the Vienna Chapter of the Society for International Development he co?chaired a session on Biomass and Outer Space at the UN Vienna Outer Space Conference UNISPACE-82 ? (a) growth experiments under no gravity conditions and (b) remote sensing for biomass inventory taking. He was also treasurer at the New York section of SID and NGO representative to the UN. To learn more about SID Vienna activities, how to participate or how to become member of the chapter, please visit the SID Vienna Chapter website at: www.sidvienna.org ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on September 7th, 2012
WHEN WHERE The Council of the Americas for a public discussion with the Brazilian Minister of Health, Alexandre Padilha.
Minister Padilha will discuss the state of health care in Brazil with an emphasis on the goals and objectives of the Rousseff administration’s efforts over the short and medium terms. This conversation will be on the record. ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 31st, 2012
SouthViews No.30, 14 August 2012 SOUTHVIEWS is a service of the South Centre to provide opinions and analysis of topical issues from a South perspective. Visit the South Centre’s website: www.southcentre.org What Explains the South’s Recent High Growth — And Can It Continue? Recently there emerged a view that developing countries had “de-coupled” their economies from the developed countries and had taken off to a path of high growth. But this is an overly-optimistic view. This article by the South Centre’s Chief Economist examines the growth record of developing countries and analyses how the good performance was based mainly on external factors that no longer exist. The next issue of SouthViews will have a follow-up article on the need for a new development strategy in the South. ……………………………………………………………… By Yilmaz Akyüz, Chief Economist, South Centre
The Growth Record of Developing Countries, 1990-2011 At the end of the 1990s and the early 2000s, many economies in the developing world were in disarray. East Asia was still recovering from the 1997 crisis while a host of other emerging economies were falling into payments and financial crises one after another; Brazil and Russia in 1998, Turkey 2000-01 and Argentina 2001-2002. The prospects for the global economy were dimmed by the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the US at the beginning of the decade, coming on top of prolonged deflation in Japan and uneven growth in the EU. For the entire period from 1990 to 2002, the average growth in DEEs (developing and emerging economies) exceeded the average growth in AEs (advanced economies) by just over 1 percentage point and in per capita terms there was hardly any income convergence. The picture was even worse in the 1980s when a large number of DEEs were suffering from severe payments difficulties caused by a debt overhang and sharp declines in commodity prices. Until the new millennium the only major economy in the South that was able to close the income gap with AEs by leaps and bounds was China, with an average growth rate close to 10 per cent during 1990-2002 compared to less than 4 per cent in the rest of the developing world. All these changed in the new millennium. From 2002 until the outbreak of the subprime crisis, the growth difference between the DEEs and AEs shot up to 5 percentage points. This was not because of deceleration in AEs, but an unprecedented acceleration in DEEs where the average growth rate almost doubled from the 1990s. The global crisis led to a loss of momentum in DEEs during 2008-09, but their growth difference with AEs widened further because of a severe recession in the latter countries. Despite subsequent recovery in AEs, growth in DEEs has continued to be faster by about 4 percentage points in 2010-2011 – a margin still considerably larger than those during the 1980s and 1990s. Taking the whole decade from 2002 until 2012, the average growth in DEEs exceeds the average growth in AEs by more than 5 per cent per annum. This is unprecedented. As noted, during the post-war golden age DEEs also grew at a very fast pace, by some 6 per cent per annum, but growth in AEs was also high, with the gap being no more than a couple of percentage points. However, there has been considerable diversity in the pace of acceleration of growth among DEEs. During pre-crisis years acceleration was faster in Africa than the two other main regions even though African growth rate remained below that of Asia. By contrast, the Western Hemisphere saw only a modest rise in average growth compared to the 1990s. Among analytical groups, fuel exporters saw faster acceleration than either the exporters of non-fuel commodities or manufactures – from just over 1 per cent in the 1990s to 7.5 per cent between 2003 and 2008. Among the major emerging economies, Russia, Argentina, Turkey, India and South Africa enjoyed much faster acceleration than the others. In the first three countries this was due to rapid recoveries from severe crises which had caused large output losses at the end of the 1990s and the early 2000s. The acceleration of growth in DEEs since the beginning of the new millennium is not due to China. Indeed, growth in China during the 1990s was almost as fast as that in the 2000s. However, it is notable that in the 1990s China was not widely perceived as an emerging economic power capable of challenging the US dominance until it had started running growing trade surpluses with the US and accumulating large dollar reserves. International trade and investment The new millennium witnessed a rapid growth in world trade which increased, in nominal dollars, by 2.5 times by 2008, with the average annual growth in total exports reaching twice the rate of growth of world output. This period also saw a significant increase in the share of DEEs in world trade, rapid expansion of South-South trade and growing global imbalances. The current accounts of AEs as a whole, which had already turned into red at the end of the 1990s, constantly deteriorated until the outbreak of the crisis. This was entirely due to mounting deficits of the US and to a lesser extent the UK, as the eurozone was broadly in balance, and Japan and the remaining AEs were running surpluses. This was reflected in growing surpluses of DEEs, which came to exceed $600 billion in 2007 of which two-thirds belonged to China and smaller East Asian DEEs and the rest to Fuel Exporters (FEs). This, together with large inflows of capital, resulted in an unprecedented rise in the international reserves of DEEs, which reached $5 trillion in 2007 despite substantially increased capital outflows. The rapid expansion of exports and growing current account surpluses of DEEs owe a great deal to US spending extravaganza. The US private savings had already began to fall and current account deficits to rise in the mid-1990s largely because of a strong wealth effect of the dot-com equity market bubble on private consumption and a boom in the property market. The spending spree continued with greater force in the 2000s when the Fed responded to the bursting of the dot-com bubble by bringing down policy rates to historical lows for fear of asset deflation and recession, and new legislation introduced in the late 1990s allowed greater room for banks to expand high-risk lending for property. Capital gains from rising house prices in the 2000s sustained the spending boom as homeowners increasingly extracted equity to finance consumption. As a result, household savings, which was some 6 per cent of GDP in the early 1990s, started to fall rapidly and disappeared altogether on the eve of the 2008 crisis. This was mirrored by growing external deficits ? the US current account was broadly balanced in the early 1990s, but it registered a deficit of over 6 per cent in 2007. Indeed the evidence provided by research in New York Fed shows a strikingly strong positive correlation between house price appreciations and current account deficits not only in the US but also in other countries that have subsequently experienced the highest degree of financial turmoil (Ferrero 2012). In Europe, the UK went through a similar property bubble, but was running a relatively small current account deficit. In the eurozone, deficits in peripheral countries were rising not only vis-à-vis the core economies, notably Germany, but also the rest of the world, reaching on average 7 per cent of GDP in Spain and 9 per cent in Portugal and Greece. These deficits resulted from loss of competitiveness due to wage settlements in excess of productivity increases in conditions of rising private consumption and property spending. The participation of these countries in the European Monetary Union facilitated the financing of these deficits by significantly lowering the risk premium. Banks in Germany, France and elsewhere in Europe were more than willing to pump in funds to finance these deficits – a process which culminated in the eurozone crisis, in much the same way as the boom-bust cycles in lending to several emerging economies in the past. Germany pursued a policy of wage deflation – competitive disinflation – running surpluses against most other eurozone members and the rest of the world, including the US. Japan was in a similar situation, relying for growth on exports and generating current account surpluses which reached 5 per cent of GDP in 2007. Thus, the US was acting as a locomotive not only to export-led East Asian DEEs but also to Japan and Germany (Akyüz 2011b). The increased outsourcing to the Sino-centric production network by transnational corporations from AEs has made a significant contribution to growing exports from East Asia. FDI to China doubled the levels of the late 1990s to reach $80 billion in 2007. Thus, China and other East Asian DEEs participating in the Sino-centric production network benefited not only from growing exports to AEs, but also from investment and technology brought in by transnational corporations to expand exportables. Until the global crisis, Chinese exports to AEs and FDI inflows reinforced each other. After 2008, when exports slowed down considerably, FDI inflows to Chinese manufacturing remained sluggish, even though China was able to restore growth on the basis of expansion of domestic demand. Capital flows and remittancesThe new millennium witnessed the beginning of the third post-war boom in capital flows to DEEs, mainly as a result of exceptionally low interest rates and rapid expansion of liquidity in AEs, including the US, the EU and Japan. Both net flows and net inflows to DEEs peaked in 2007 before the outbreak of the subprime debacle. The surge in capital inflows was accompanied by rapidly narrowing spreads on emerging-market debt, brought about by significantly improved risk appetite. This, together with low interest rates in AEs, resulted in a sharp decline in the cost of external financing for DEEs. Most DEEs enjoyed the increased risk appetite and shared in the boom in capital inflows irrespective of their underlying fundamentals. Although capital flows among DEEs have also been increasing rapidly and China has become a major investor in some resource-rich DEEs, a very large proportion of capital came to DEEs from lenders and investors in AEs. However, China contributed to the expansion of capital inflows to DEEs by investing its twin surpluses in current and capital accounts in reserves, mostly in dollars. Large acquisitions of US Treasuries by China and FEs helped to keep long-term rates relatively low even as the US Fed started to raise short-term rates. Thus, while growing US external deficits were being financed “officially” there was plenty of highly-leveraged private money searching for yield in DEEs. A mutually reinforcing process emerged between private flows to DEEs and official flows to the US – the former were translated into reserves of DEEs and constituted an important part of official flows to the US, and supported lower rates there and private flows to DEEs. Private capital inflows to DEEs held up initially during the subprime debacle despite growing strains in credit and asset markets in the US and Europe. However, with the collapse of a number of leading financial institutions in the US, notably the Lehman Brothers, the boom came to a halt in the second half of 2008. The rapidly growing volatility in financial markets led to an extreme and generalized risk aversion, pushing up spreads on emerging-market debt and triggering a flight to safety into US Treasuries and appreciation of the dollar vis-à-vis other major currencies, even though the US was the epicentre of the crisis. However, the contraction of private capital inflows to DEEs was short-lived. They started to recover in the first half of 2009, driven by historically low interest rates and rapid expansion of liquidity in major AEs brought about by monetary policy response to the crisis as well as better growth performance in DEEs and a shift in risk perceptions against AEs. In the second half of 2011, a generalized increase in risk aversion led to exit of capital from several DEEs (IMF WEO 2012 January update), but according to the latest available projections by the IMF (WEO September 2011), both net private inflows and net flows will continue to remain strong in 2012, though still below the 2007 peaks. DEEs also enjoyed a rapid growth of workers remittances, at an average annual rate of some 20 per cent between 2002 and 2008, rising from less than $100 billion at the beginning of the decade to more than $320 billion in 2008, exceeding all categories of capital inflows except FDI. Much of these also came from AEs, with Europe accounting for almost half of total inflows followed by the US. Some major emerging economies were among the top receivers, including India, China, Mexico and Indonesia. In 2007 remittances amounted to 1–1.5 per cent of GDP in China and Indonesia, around 3 per cent in India and Mexico, over 4 per cent in Pakistan and 11 per cent in the Philippines. In many of these countries they led to a significant improvement in the current account, reducing deficits and even generating surpluses despite large trade deficits. With the outbreak of the crisis remittances registered a moderate decline in 2009. However, the subsequent recovery has been weak; during 2010-11 they are estimated to have grown by less than half of the rate observed during pre-crisis years. According to recent projections by the World Bank (Mohapatra et al. 2011) they would grow by 7-8 per cent per annum in the coming years, subject to serious downside risks associated with persistent unemployment in Europe and the US and hardening political attitudes toward new migration. Commodity pricesWith rapid liquidity expansion and acceleration of growth in the global economy, commodity prices started to rise in 2003, gaining further momentum in 2006. The factors driving the boom included a strong pace of activity in DEEs, notably in China, where commodity-intensity of growth is high, low initial stocks, weak supply response and relatively weak dollar. These markets also became increasingly financialized after the beginning of the decade as financial investors sought to diversify into commodity-linked assets and low interest rates led to a search for yield in commodity markets (UNCTAD TDR 2011). In the case of food, diversion to bio-fuels and rising cost of fertilizers and transport due to high oil prices also played a role. Despite growing financial strains in the US, commodity prices continued to increase before they made a sharp downturn in August 2008. This boom-bust cycle in commodity prices in the middle of the subprime crisis was largely due to shifts in market sentiments regarding the future course of prices. Initially, the subprime crisis was seen as a hiccup and the downturn in economic activity was expected to be short-lived, including by the IMF (WEO, July 2008), followed by a rapid and robust recovery. However, with mounting financial difficulties in the US and the collapse of the Lehman Brothers, sentiments turned sour and growth prospects were dampened. Investors pulled out large amounts of money from oil and non-oil futures, more or less at the same time as capital flows to DEEs were reversed and the dollar started to strengthen. By the end of October 2008, food was 27 per cent and oil 45 per cent below their peaks. Again the downturn in commodity prices was short-lived and the upturn in 2009 coincided with the recovery of capital flows to DEEs and the decline of the dollar. After falling in late 2008 and early 2009, index trading also started to gain momentum as commodity prices turned up in spring 2009 as a result of increased demand from DEEs, notably China, in conditions of continued expansion of international liquidity and historically low interest rates. Investment in commodities recovered rapidly while the number of exchange traded options and futures rose to unprecedented levels (BIS 2010). Despite recent weakening of markets for metals and minerals and several agricultural commodities, prices remain significantly above the levels of the early 2000s. Improved domestic economic indicators — but significantly due to external factors The past ten years have witnessed considerable improvements in macroeconomic conditions in DEEs. Alongside the acceleration of growth, fiscal and payments deficits have declined considerably and inflation has been brought under control in a large majority of countries. Improvements in economic management and institutions, following a number of policy errors resulting from adherence to the Washington Consensus, have no doubt played an important role in bringing these about. However, extremely favourable global conditions have also made a major contribution and indeed played a more crucial part in many countries. DEEs have generally manifested greater fiscal discipline in recent years. Average central government deficits were hovering around 3.5 per cent of GDP at the beginning of the 2000s (IMF WEO October 2007). By 2006-07 they came down to around 0.5 per cent. During the same period, the average external debt of DEEs declined from around 40 per cent of GDP to 25 per cent. Total public debt as a proportion of GDP also declined considerably in many highly-indebted emerging economies, particularly on account of rapidly falling external debt. Considerable progress has also been made in bringing inflation under control since the beginning of the decade. Average consumer inflation in DEEs was close to 30 per cent per annum throughout the 1990s. It came down to single-digit levels, just over 6 per cent during 2003-07. This is largely because of sharp declines in inflation in Latin America towards the levels of more stable Asian economies. Drawing on the lessons from past crises, DEEs have generally been more successful in managing exchange rates, capital flows and balance of payments, even though there are notable exceptions, including many countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Turkey and South Africa – those more seriously affected by the 2008-09 crisis. The resilience of domestic financial institutions and markets to shocks has also been improved through tighter prudential regulations and supervision, and significantly increased capitalization. All these have been reflected in significantly improved credit ratings of major emerging economies. However, improvements in macroeconomic balances in DEEs have not been independent of the favourable international economic environment. In Latin America, an important part of the decline in budget deficits after 2002 was due to rising commodity prices, with revenues from commodity taxes, profits and loyalties accounting for as much as 50 per cent of the total increase in the fiscal revenue ratio in some countries (Cornia et al. 2011). An ECLAC report (Jiménez and Gómez-Sabaini 2009) argued that much of the improvement in the fiscal situation after 2002 was the result of the steady increase in commodity prices and warned that a sharp decline in these prices could seriously jeopardize the fiscal achievements. Indeed, the fiscal space gained during the subprime expansion was largely lost with the reversal of commodity prices in 2008-09 when budgets went into deficits in the region by some 3 per cent of GDP (ECLAC 2010). The situation is much the same for current account balances in commodity exporters in Latin America and Africa. At the end of the 1990s and early 2000s current accounts in these regions registered deficits in the order of 3-4 per cent of GDP. By 2007, both regions had moved to a surplus, at a rate of some 1 per cent of GDP in Latin America and over 3 per cent in Africa. Again, an important reason was the increase in oil and non-oil commodity prices, which resulted in a 50 per cent improvement in the terms-of-trade in Latin America between 2002 and 2006. It is estimated that without terms-of-trade gains from commodity price increases, the current account of the region would have shown a deficit of about 4 per cent of GDP. Indeed, external deficits started to grow after 2008 with the decline in commodity prices and increased reliance on domestic demand for growth. In several cases, success in bringing inflation under control also owes a greater deal to favourable international financial conditions and the generalized surge in capital flows. The exchange rate operated as an anchor for inflationary expectations, as net capital flows exceeded current account deficits and led to nominal appreciations. Finally and more importantly, not all DEEs enjoying acceleration of growth in the 2000s have seen commensurate improvements in domestic savings, capital accumulation or productivity – a factor which raises considerable doubt about sustainability of strong growth. The average savings rate in middle-income countries during 2000-08 was lower than the rate in the 1990s while the record on investment and productivity was mixed (World Bank 2011). Again there is considerable diversity in the pace of capital accumulation among the DEEs which enjoyed a significant acceleration of growth in the 2000s. In Latin America private investment rose as a share of GDP, but remained well below the levels in other regions (IMF REO October 2008). Low rates of investment in Brazil, as well as some other DEEs in the region, is a major reason why Latin America continues to have a poor record in productivity compared to East Asia (Palma 2011). In several economies in East Asia, including Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Taiwan (China) and Indonesia, investment rates have been hovering around 20 per cent of GDP in recent years, less than half the rate in China. Large current account surpluses in some of these economies reflect low rates of domestic investment rather than exceptionally high domestic savings rates. In none of these East Asian economies have investment rates recovered the levels attained before the 1997 crisis. Recent investment rates have been too low to produce rapid and sustained growth of the kind many of these economies had enjoyed during the earlier phases of their industrialization, creating concerns that some of them run the risk of getting caught in a middle-income trap (Radhi and Zeufack 2009). Conclusion: What then accounts for the South’s Growth? The exceptionally favourable global economic conditions prevailing before the outbreak of the crisis not only improved internal and external balances and stability in DEEs, but also contributed to the expansion of economic activity, directly or indirectly. China and other export-oriented East Asian DEEs benefited significantly from credit, consumption and property bubbles created by speculative lending and investment in the US and Europe, growing rapidly based on exports to these markets, running increasing current account surpluses and accumulating large amounts of reserves. In most DEEs in Latin America and Africa, the combination of increasing commodity prices and declining cost of external financing significantly reduced the payments deficits and allowed to expand domestic demand and accelerate growth. In oil-importing emerging economies such as India and Turkey, capital inflows were more than sufficient to meet the deficits created by oil price shocks, again allowing rapid growth based primarily on domestic demand. India additionally enjoyed a rapid growth in workers’ remittances which reached 3.3 per cent of GDP in 2007. Low interest rates in AEs and the surge in capital inflows also allowed most emerging economies to pursue expansionary monetary policies and maintain historically low interest rates, stimulating domestic demand. Large inflows of capital in excess of current account needs in deficit countries or coming on top of current account surpluses in surplus countries, contributed to expansion by creating asset bubbles. Equity prices rose sharply between 2002 and 2007 both in dollar and local currency terms. The increase was particularly strong in Brazil, China, India and Turkey, and many of these also experienced credit and property booms both due to increased entry of non-residents to domestic asset markets and the impact of capital inflows on domestic monetary conditions (Akyüz 2010). In several countries growing workers’ remittances from abroad were also translated into domestic consumption, thereby adding to demand, output and employment. It is not always easy to identify precisely the relative contributions of global conditions and domestic policies to growth in DEEs. However, evidence strongly suggests that extremely favourable global conditions played a much more predominant role in the acceleration of growth in DEEs in the new millennium than is typically appreciated in the popular debate on the rise of the South. This is particularly true for commodity-rich economies of Latin America and Africa which, together with India and Turkey, account for much of the recent acceleration of growth in the South. Empirical research in the Inter-American Development Bank on the role of external factors in boom-bust cycles in Latin America over 1990-2006 has come to the conclusion that an important part of growth in the period after 2002 could be explained by improved global conditions (Izquierdo et al. 2008; IDB 2008). It is found that growth in Latin America after 2002 would have been lower by 2 per cent had these variables remained at the levels predicted in the late 1990s. Growth would have been lower even by a greater margin if the unfavourable global economic conditions (high risk spreads and interest rates, low commodity prices and severely depressed capital inflows) that were prevailing in the aftermath of the Russian crisis had persisted. Until the outbreak of the crisis, growth in East Asian DEEs relied heavily on exports. In China during 2002-08 exports grew on average by 25 per cent per annum while domestic consumption lagged income growth. During this period, about one-third of GDP growth in China was due to exports, taking into account their direct and indirect import contents. If the multiplier effect of exports on domestic consumption and knock-on effect on domestic investment are added, this proportion goes up to almost 50 per cent. Much of these exports went to AEs. Exports of East Asian DEEs closely linked to the Sino-centric production network, including Korea and Taiwan (China) and the major ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) also grew rapidly during this period, but except Vietnam, not as rapidly as China’s. The share of exports in GDP is higher in the majority of these countries than in China, both in gross-value and value-added terms. This, together with relatively rapid growth of exports, meant that pre-crisis growth in ASEAN+2 depended even more on exports than in China. Indeed estimates suggest that during 2003-07 about 60 per cent of growth in Korea, Taiwan (China) and Thailand and even a greater proportion of growth in Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam came from exports, taking into account their import contents. Most of the exports went to AEs, directly, or through China by providing the latter country parts and components for its exports to AEs. Author: Yilmaz Akyuz is the Chief Economist of the South Centre. Contact: south@southcentre.org. This article was published in the South Bulletin (2 August 2012). The full South Centre Research Paper No.44 on The Staggering Rise of the South? can be obtained from www.southcentre.org. To view other articles in SouthViews, please click here. For more information, please contact Vicente Paolo Yu of the South Centre: Email yu@southcentre.org, or telephone +41 22 791 80 50. ————————————–
Think back to 1967. The job you have today may not even have existed. The Internet, and all the jobs that have come with it, were decades away. The Detroit automakers were dominant. Quality of life was different, too: The median household income was an inflation-adjusted $40,261, compared with $50,303 in 2008. There were also a hundred million fewer of us; 1967 was the year the U.S. population hit 200 million. We passed the 300 million mark in 2006, and by 2050, there will very likely be more than 400 million Americans. The lifestyle of the average American may change just as much from 2010 to 2050 as it did from 1967 to 2006. The economy will especially undergo change. 10. IndiaGDP: $1.676 trillionPopulation: 1,210,193,422India recorded the highest growth rates in the mid-2000s, and is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. The growth was led primarily due to a huge increase in the size of the middle class consumer, a large labor force and considerable foreign investments. India is the nineteenth largest exporter and tenth largest importer in the world. Economic growth rates are projected at around 7% for the 2011-12 fiscal year. India adopted free market principles and liberalized its economy to international trade under the guidance of Manmohan Singh, who then was the Finance Minister of India under the leadership of P.V.Narasimha Rao the then Prime Minister. Following these strong economic reforms, the country’s economic growth progressed at a rapid pace with very high rates of growth and large increases in the incomes of people.
9. RussiaGDP: $1.850 trillionPopulation: 143,030,106In 2011 Russia’s gross domestic product grew by 4.2 percent, the world’s third highest growth rate among leading economies. The government expects it to grow 3.7 percent in 2012. “Following 4.2 percent growth in 2011, we think the slowdown will lead to GDP growth of about 3.5 percent for the full year,” S&P Chief Economist for Europe Jean-Michel Six said in a statement. Russia has an abundance of natural gas, oil, coal, and precious metals. Russia has undergone significant changes since the collapse of the Soviet Union, moving from a centrally planned economy to a more market-based and globally integrated economy.
8. ItalyGDP: $2.198 trillionPopulation: 60,681,514Italy has a diversified industrial economy with high gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and developed infrastructure. According to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the CIA World Factbook, in 2010 Italy was the seventh-largest economy in the world and the fourth-largest in Europe in terms of nominal GDP, and the tenth-largest economy in the world and fifth-largest in Europe in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) GDP. Italy is member of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations, the European Union and the OECD.
7. United KingdomGDP: $2.417 trillionPopulation: 62,262,000The UK is one of the world’s most globalised countries. London is the world’s largest financial centre alongside New York and has the largest city GDP in Europe. As of December 2010 the UK had the third-largest stock of both inward and outward foreign direct investment (in each case after the United States and France). The aerospace industry of the UK is the second- or third-largest national aerospace industry, depending upon the method of measurement. The pharmaceutical industry plays an important role in the UK economy and the country has the third-highest share of global pharmaceutical R&D expenditures (after the United States and Japan). The British economy is boosted by North Sea oil and gas reserves, valued at an estimated £250 billion in 2007. The UK is currently ranked seventh in the world (and third in Europe) in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index.
6. BrazilGDP: $2.493 trillionPopulation: 192,376,496 |
| Ranking | Country | Approximate GDP- Purchasing Power Parity |
| 1 | United States of America | $14,624,180,000,000 (that is $14.6 trillion dollars if you are trying to count zeros) |
| 2 | China | $10,084,370,000,000 |
| 3 | Japan | $4,308,630,000,000 |
| 4 | India | $4,001,100,000,000 |
| 5 | Germany | $2,932,040,000,000 |
| 6 | Russia | $2,218,760,000,000 |
| 7 | Brazil | $2,181,680,000,000 |
| 8 | United Kingdom | $2,181,070,000,000 |
| 9 | France | $2,146,280,000,000 |
| 10 | Italy | $1,771,140,000,000 |
While the US is still the world’s dominant economy, and central to the global economic system thanks to the simple fact that the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency (ie the currency that we all need in order to trade), we can clearly see that China’s clout is rapidly growing. The numbers tell the story not just of the BRIC, but also the G2 or Chamerica, as some are calling the US/ China combo.
Further, their practical prediction for 2015 is that according to current forecasts, by 2015 India will have overtaken Japan to be the third most important economy in the world, and Mexico will have entered the Top Ten – and kicked Italy out of that exclusive club.
Then, looking at the US CIA studies FACT BOOK:
To give us a better global view, this map from the CIA World Factbook will help to illustrate the differences between calculating world GDP figures on a PPP or nominal basis.

A sectoral analysis of country GDP allows us to understand the paradigm shift now occurring within most world economies. Growth patterns generally show a shift from agriculture to manufacturing and ultimately to the services sector.
The following table shows the percentage of GDP contributed by each sector in the top ten economies of the world:
| Country | Contribution of Services Sector in GDP (estimated for 2007) | Contribution of Industrial Sector in GDP | Contribution of Agricultural Sector in GDP |
| United States of America | 78.5% | 20.6% | 0.9% |
| China | 39.5% | 49.5% | 11% |
| Japan | 73.3% | 25.2% | 1.5% |
| India | 55% | 28.4% | 16.6% |
| Germany | 69.5% | 26.9% | 0.9% |
| United Kingdom | 75.5% | 23.6% | 0.9% |
| Russia | 56.3% | 39.1% | 4.6% |
| France | 77.3% | 20.7% | 2% |
| Brazil | 64% | 30.8% | 5.1% |
| Italy | 69.3% | 32% | 5% |
The growth rate of these economies is also an important factor, and is directly related to the overall development of a specific economy. Group of Seven Countries such as the United States, France, Italy and the United Kingdom all typically have smaller growth rates – usually in the region of about 2% per annum.
By contrast, emerging economies such as India and China have growth rates of around 8% to 11%, while the ‘new’ emerging economies may experience even more blistering growth rates. Developed countries have already reached a saturation point, and thus expand less than emerging economies, where possibilities and opportunities are ripe, investors are ready to take risks, and consumers are demanding more goods and services than ever before.
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 17th, 2012
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 12th, 2012 From: Miroslav Polzer, Secretary General, International Association for the Advancement of Innovative Approaches to Global Challenges IAAI Facilitator of Rio+20 Issues Cluster “Innovation” International Association for the Advancement of Innovative Approaches (IAAI), a Civil Society Organization based in Klagenfurt/Austria has invited young people from around the world to participate in Rio+20 conference (United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development www.uncsd2012.org) by submitting music videos in the context of Rio+20 Global Youth Music Contest (GYMC) www.global-rockstar.net.
The response has been overwhelming! More than 300 songs have been submitted from more than 40 countries, more than200.000 unique site visitors participated in online voting.
The Rio+20 GYMC winners of both categories (children: up to 15 years and youth: 15 – 30 years) won a trip to Rio and participated in several events and activities at Rio+20 thus energizing the official negotiations and contributing heartpower and hope to everybody who had a chance to meet them either in Rio or virtually through the many social mediaactivities of Rio+20 GYMC (e.g. 6.000 likes on on facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Rio20-Global-Youth-Music-Contest/275439455817158 & www.facebook.com/GlobalRockstar.net). THE POST-RIO SCENE: During the past weeks since Rio+20 conference, GYMC team has put together a Rio+20 GYMC photo documentary to provide an overview over the many activities carried out around the world and in Rio in the context of GYMC and to give some insights into the conceptual backgrounds of youth empowerment, sharing of resources and global governance innovation of the initiative (like e.g. the “Rio+20 15/15/15 UN Civil Society Partnership Voluntary Commitment”which has been presented and adopted at a Rio+20 IAAI side event).
The Rio+20 GYMC Photo Documentary “The Rio+20 Global Youth Music Contest Journey Towards The Future We Want” is being presented on International Day of Youth 2012 to remind the world that we – the present generation – have aresponsibility to deliver on the promises of Rio+20 It is not clear yet whether Rio+20 has been a failure or a success. Avenues for civil society participation have been very laudable at Rio+20 but in general the systemic change towards effective global governance, real commitment of UN member states to act towards fixing existing market failures and governance failures in order to safeguard the future of humanity on planet earth is there in the Rio+20 outcome document only as a “potential”.
There is the threat that the world will forget about Rio+20 and continue with business as usual.
Those who will lose most by our inaction are young people and future generations.
Therefore young people are the most trustworthy messengers and advocates for a better world – for The Future We Want.
The messages of global youth expressed in the songs that have been received in Rio+20 GYMC (everybody is encouraged – especially on International day of Youth – to listen to them again and again on www.global-rockstar-net), their heartpower and their global community building power shall inspire and energize the implementation of Rio+20 outcomes in different UN bodies (like e.g. UN General Assembly) and processes (e.g. UN Climate Change conferences, World Urban Campaign of UN Habitat etc.) over the coming months.
To take a slogan from the “Future We Want Rally” which took place in the context of 2nd Rio+20 Intersessional 16 December 2011 in New York (see page 36 of Rio+20 GYMC photo documentary for details)
“A Better World is Possible! – We are Unstoppable!”
GYMC / 151515 Outlook
IAAI is going to work over coming weeks on bringing the GYMC winners to the Opening of the UN General Assembly in New York end of September as they are a symbol of hope and a symbolic bridge for Rio+20 outcome implementation from Rio to New York and beyond (get inspired by watching them sing “Imagine” at “Concert for a New Earth”vimeo.com/45515681).
Next rounds of Global Youth Music Contest – which will have also a strong action orientation and include concrete promotion of low-carbon lifestyles and civic engagement – will be prepared in the context of - UN Climate Change conference UNFCCC COP 18 end of 2012 in Doha/Qatar (to be confirmed) - as part of IAAI “Global Challenges Urban Games” in the context of World Urban Campaign of UN Habitat (first exploratory meetings will be held at World Urban Forum in Naples/Italy www.unhabitat.org/wuf
Resources Issues and Potentials for Partnerships/Sponsorships
Rio+20 GYMC has been an extraordinary success despite the fact that there has been no external funding available. IAAI and its members have invested about 100.000 US$ into implementation of this first round of GYMC in the context of Rio+20. Now that GYMC initiative has demonstrated its potentials, IAAI hopes to find long-term strategic partners like foundations, Official Development Assistance agencies etc. who will be able and willing to invest in GYMC related institution building (network of national and regional coordinators and institutionalization of links with partner organizations) and related youth empowerment and capacity building (programs on GYMC as informal education for sustainable development).
But for the time being there could occur significant delays in implementation of GYMC/151515 initiatives if there will not be progress in fundraising efforts soon.
So – partners and supporters welcome – contact us at office@glocha.info
Let us work together for The Future We Want!
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 5th, 2012 Tancredo de Almeida Neves, Commonly called Tancredo Neves (March 4, 1910 – April 21, 1985) – was born in São João del Rey, in the state of Minas Gerais, of mostly Portuguese, but also Austrian descent. [1] Neves was the opposition candidate to replace President João Baptista de Oliveira Figueiredo – the last general-President of Brazil. The campaign for direct elections failed. There was no popular public vote.[5] Neves was elected President by a majority of the Electoral College on January 15, 1985, where he received 480 votes.[6] USING WIKIPEDIA LANGUAGE THE FOLLOWING IS THE OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION OF A CHAIN OF EVENTS: On March 14, on the last day of his predecessor’s term, and on the eve of his own inauguration, Neves became severely ill, requiring immediate surgery. He thus was not able to attend his own inauguration on March 15. The Constitution required the President and Vice-President elect to take oaths of office before the assembled National Congress. The inauguration was accordingly held for the Vice-President only, the Vice-President immediately assumed the powers of the presidency as Acting President. At that time, there was still hope that Neves would recover and appear before Congress to take the oath of office. However, Neves suffered from abdominal complications and developed generalized infections. After seven operations, Neves died on April 21, more than one month after the beginning of his term of office, without ever having taken the oath of office as President.[7] He was succeeded by José Sarney who was the Vice President. Neves’s ordeal was intensively covered by the Brazilian media and followed with anxiety by the whole nation, who had seen in him the way out of the authoritarian regime into what he had called a “New Republic” (Nova República). His death caused an outpouring of national grief. Tancredo Neves is counted among the official list of presidents of Brazil as a matter of homage and honour, since, not having taken the oath of office, he technically never became President. An Act of Congress was thus necessary to make this homage official. Accordingly on the first anniversary of his death, a statute was signed into law declaring that he should be counted among the Presidents of Brazil. BUT NOBODY I TALKED TO IN BRAZIL BELIEVED THAT TANCREDO NEVES DIED OF NATURAL CAUSES. THE BELIEF IS RATHER THAT THE GENERALS WERE NOT READY YET TO TRANSFER POWER TO AN ELECTED PRESIDENT AND THIS INCLUDED NEVES, EVEN THOUGH HIS OWN ELECTION WAS NOT YET THE STATE OF THE ART OF PURE DEMOCRACY. During the period that he was President Elect I had the great honor to be invited to Hotel Pierre in New York to a Presentation he made as guest of the Americas Society and Mr. David Rockefeller. Shortly after that the Organization of American States was involved in a conference on ethanol fuels that was held in Bello Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Neves was the opening speaker and Aureliano Chaves, who later became the Energy Minister, and at that time was Governor of Minas Gerais, was the opening presenter. Here was a Brazil in motion that was talking independence of oil imports and local production of fuels. Was this something that ruffled feathers? Above is my addition to the following article that does not mention Tancredo Neves. Nevertheless, if Brazil is ready to look under the rugs of dictatorship, even that an amnesty for the sake of internal peace has been declared, the Tancredo Neves case will eventually be touched upon as well. All what we can say nevertheless, the search for the truth of past dictatorships in the Southern Latin Cone, has in it the makings of unravelling as well US business involvement and CIA operatives that taught methodology of torture in the region. =========================================================================== Leader’s Torture in the ’70s Stirs Ghosts in Brazil.By SIMON ROMEROPublished by the New York Times: August 4, 2012RIO DE JANEIRO — Her nom de guerre was Estela. Part of a shadowy urban guerrilla group at the time of her capture in 1970, she spent three years behind bars, where interrogators repeatedly tortured her with electric shocks to her feet and ears, and forced her into the pau de arara, or parrot’s perch, in which victims are suspended upside down naked, from a stick, with bound wrists and ankles. ![]() The Lady President of Brazil by Ricardo Moraes/ReutersMs. Rousseff, now president of Brazil, says little these days about the cruelty she endured. That former guerrilla is now Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff. As a truth commission begins examining the military’s crackdown on the population during a dictatorship that lasted two decades, Brazilians are riveted by chilling details emerging about the painful pasts of both their country and their president. The schisms of that era, which stretched from 1964 to 1985, live on here. Retired military officials, including Maurício Lopes Lima, 76, a former lieutenant colonel accused of torturing Ms. Rousseff, have questioned the evidence linking the military to abuses. Rights groups, meanwhile, are hounding Mr. Lopes Lima and others accused of torture, encircling their residences in cities across Brazil. “A torturer of the dictatorship lives here,” they recently wrote in red paint on the entrance to Mr. Lopes Lima’s apartment building in the seaside resort city of Guarujá, part of a street-theater protest. While a 1979 amnesty still shields military officials from prosecution for abuses, the commission, which began in May and has a two-year mandate, is nevertheless stirring up ghosts. The dictatorship killed an estimated 400 people; torture victims are thought to number in the thousands. The torture endured by Ms. Rousseff, who was 22 when the abuse began and is now 64, is among the most prominent of hundreds of decades-old cases that the commission is examining. The president is not the region’s only political leader to rise to power after being imprisoned and tortured, a sign of the tumultuous pasts of other Latin American countries. As a young medical student, Chile’s former president,Michelle Bachelet, survived a harrowing stretch of detention and torture after a 1973 military coup. And Uruguay’s president, José Mujica, a former leader of the Tupamaro guerrilla organization, underwent torture during nearly a decade and half of imprisonment. Since Ms. Rousseff took office, she has refused to play the part of a victim while subtly pushing for more transparency into the years of Brazil’s military dictatorship. She rarely refers in public to the cruelty she endured; aside from ceremonial appearances, she has spoken sparingly about the truth commission itself. She declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the commission or the time she spent in prison. Ms. Rousseff has evolved considerably since her days in the underground resistance, when she used several aliases, a trajectory similar to that of other leftists who ascended into Brazil’s political elite. The daughter of a Bulgarian émigré businessman and his Brazilian schoolteacher wife, she grew up in relative privilege, only to abandon that upbringing to join a fledgling guerrilla group, the Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard. After her release from prison, she moved to the southern city of Porto Alegre, where her husband at the time, Carlos Franklin Paixão de Araújo, was completing his own prison sentence for subversion. She resumed her studies in economics, gave birth to a daughter, Paula, in 1976, and entered local politics. Moderating her political views, she slowly rose to national prominence as a results-oriented technocrat. She served as chief of staff and energy minister for Brazil’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He prevailed on her to run in the 2010 election. She governs with a markedly different style from that of Mr. da Silva, a gregarious former union leader. Even as Brazil’s economy slows, her approval rating stands around 77 percent, as the government expands antipoverty spending and stimulus projects. She won plaudits from some in the opposition by acknowledging the economic achievements ofFernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil’s president from 1995 to 2002. She keeps a low profile in Brasília, where she lives in the Alvorada Palace, the modernist presidential residence, with her mother and an aunt (she is divorced from Mr. Araújo, though the two remain close). News media pore over her interests, which range from René Magritte’s surrealist paintings to the HBO fantasy series “Game of Thrones.” At the same time, her hard-charging governing style — she has been said to berate senior officials until they cry — has been enshrined in Brazilian popular culture, with Gustavo Mendes, a cross-dressing comedian, attaining fame by imitating her on the raunchy national television program “Casseta and Planeta Go Deep.” Such satirical derision on television of a Brazilian leader would have been almost unthinkable at the time of Ms. Rousseff’s incarceration, when Brazilians faced censorship, prison sentences — or worse — for criticizing military rulers. Her experiences in the dictatorship’s torture chambers remained unknown to the public for decades. Some details emerged in 2005, after she was serving in Mr. da Silva’s cabinet, when testimony she provided to the author of a book on women who resisted the military dictatorship was published in Brazilian newspapers. She described the progression from palmatória, a torture method in which a paddle or stick is used to strike the knuckles and palms of the hand, to the next, when she was stripped naked, bound upside down and submitted to electric shocks on different parts of her body, including her breasts, inner thighs and head. It was generally thought that Ms. Rousseff’s torture sessions were limited to prisons in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, until an investigative report published in June described more torture interrogations, including sessions during a two-month stretch at a military prison in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais. When she was still an obscure provincial official, she gave testimony in 2001 to an investigator from Minas Gerais, describing how interrogators there beat her in the face, distorting her dental ridge. One tooth came loose and became rotten from the pummeling, she said, and was later dislodged by a blow from another interrogator in São Paulo. Robson Sávio, the scholar who interviewed her then, said she had no obligation to respond to the request for testimony, since the Minas Gerais commission had already collected proof that she had been tortured. But she did so anyway; by the end of the encounter, after recalling interrogations resulting in other injuries, including the hemorrhaging of her uterus, she was in tears, he said. “I remember the fear when my skin trembled,” she said back in 2001. “Something like that marks us for the rest of our lives.” Mr. Lima Lopes, identified as one of Ms. Rousseff’s torturers in São Paulo and still living in seaside Guarujá, has denied torturing her, while defiantly calling her a “good guerrilla.” Other retired military figures, meanwhile, have adopted a similar stance. Luiz Eduardo Rocha Paiva, a former secretary general of Brazil’s Army, called into question in a newspaper interview this year whether Ms. Rousseff had been tortured. But he also claimed she belonged to an armed militant group seeking to install a Soviet-inspired dictatorship. Both insurgents and counterinsurgency agents committed abuses, he said. “Was there torture during the military regime? Yes,” he said. “Is there torture in Brazil today? Yes,” he added, referring to the deplorable conditions in some Brazilian prisons. Ms. Rousseff, who has insisted she never took part in an armed act against the government, has opted not to publicly clash with the former officers. Meanwhile, the commission continues without interference from the president. Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, a noted legal scholar who is one of its seven members, said the only time he met Ms. Rousseff was when he and his colleagues were convened this year in Brasília. Here in Rio, the search for knowledge of the past has moved state authorities to pay reparations to nearly 900 people tortured in the state during the dictatorship. Among them is Ms. Rousseff, who said in May that she would donate her check of about $10,000 to Torture Never Again, a group that seeks to raise awareness of the military’s abuses. Still, despite such moves, closure remains evasive. Rights activists here were stunned in July after the office of Torture Never Again was burglarized, and archives describing the psychological treatment undertaken by torture victims were stolen. ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 1st, 2012 We all know the story of the “Little Engine that Could” – you remember – it huffed and puffed and did what it was expected to do. Now listen – I just got back home from having seen the” Little House that Could” – it could help anyone who lives in a house in the suburbs to become energy independent. The Little House can get us near the ideal of energy autarky – clear independence – country wide as well. The house, located at Hungereckstrasse 23, 1230 Vienna (that is Vienna 23rd District (Liesing) belongs to Gerhard Kaindl who is the Coordinator of the EuroSolar Club of Friends (Solarstammtisch) in Vienna. He is active in the Hietzing (13th District) Club – that is also the district where his work-place is and is a neighboring district to where his home is. He is an employee of the Department of Conservation of significant historic buildings owned by the Federal Government of Austria. This is part of the Ministry of Economics, Family, and Youth. His enthusiasm for energy autarky was picked up also by his son who helps run the home. The house looks like any other house in his street – though it is newly built. The only thing that gives away that it is a special house is the fact that the 55m2 surface of the roof is covered photo-voltaic plates. The house is white – the roof looks black. That is all. The house has four energy elements: (1) Tight Construction. (2) A Heat Pump and heat & cooling collection from the ground with air circulation. (3) Rain Water collection from the roof into an underground cistern. (4) The Photo-Voltaic sun collector. The rain-water is used for flushing the toilets and in the garden. The heat pump covers most heat needs and the PV collectors provide excess electricity that at this time is sold to the grid. The basement of the house has a command room with two closets – one for the heat-pump, the other for the electric current electronic gages. and then there is a stand with shelves for instruments. Nothing more. A common house this size requires 3,600 KWh electricity – but this house needs only 1,800 KWh. The PV covered roof can provide 9,000 KWh – so about 7,000 KWh can be turned to the grid if the electricity is used just to run the house. But this will change as the simple electric car that will become part of the house needs 15 KWh for a 100km/day use – this will mean a reduction of the surplus by 1,500 KWh per car. Assume two cars and an electric bicycle and you end up with an energy independent family that also turns back to the electricity grid nearly the full amount of electricity that a similar house in size needs if it is not fitted with the four elements we noted above. IS IT NOT AMAZING THAT THE GOVERNMENT – IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST – DOES NOT OBLIGATE NEW HOME BUILDERS TO USE ALL THE METHODS OF REDUCING THE NATIONAL DEPENDENCE ON POLLUTING AND NOT-SECURE ENERGY SUPPLIES? The suburban homes are thus really some of the lowest hanging fruits on the energy independence and low CO2 emissions tree! It surely beats even the buying of CO2 credits overseas by reducing the need to build fossil fuels burning power plants. Further, it will decrease the expense for building power plants of all sorts – even hydro-power plants – and thus reduce environment impacts. ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 1st, 2012 GOING TO THE UN 67th UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY – THIS SEPTEMBER – 2012 PLEASE NOTE:
THE MAIN ACHIEVEMENT OF RIO+20 OR “THE FUTURE WE WANT” WAS THE COMING ON BOARD OF THE MANDATE TO THE UN SECRETARY-GENERAL TO TAKE INTO CONSIDERATION the “PROMOTING INTERGENERATIONAL SOLIDARITY FOR THE ACHIEVEMENT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, TAKING INTO ACCOUNT THE NEEDS OF FUTURE GENERATIONS, INCLUDING BY INVITING THE SECRETARY GENERAL TO PRESENT A REPORT ON THIS ISSUE.” (paragraph 86 of OUR COMMON VISION. We learned today that the UN Secretariat has started on a path that does not yet take into account the above mandate – so we are compelled to point out that without attention to above, there is no gain from RIO+20. ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 1st, 2012 The original ends with the conventional – Copyright © United Nations 2012, All rights reserved. WHAT? NOW THAT IS A STRANGE APPLICATION A COPYRIGHT ATTEMPT! WE THINK THE UN IS PAID TO PROVIDE THE INFORMATION WE RE-POST HERE, AND NOTHING LIKE A COPYRIGHT COULD APPLY TO THE SERVICE YOU ARE COMPELLED TO PROVIDE THE WORLD AT LARGE AS MANDATED BY THE MEMBER STATES.. WE HOPE SOMEONE AT THE UN READS WHAT WE SAY HERE. WE ARE QUITE UPSET WITH UN OFFICIALS THAT DO NOT REALIZE THAT THEIR APPOINTMENT IS – TO JUST ANSWER A MANDATE THEY GET FROM THE UN MEMBER STATES. ————————— Further, looking at what was decided at Rio de Janeiro – and mandated to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for his preparation for the UN 67 General Assembly September 2012 – Paragraphs #84-86 0f the text – “THE FUTURE WE WANT” – it is not just about the MDG’s and Development – but rather about SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT in context of ”PROMOTING INTERGENERATIONAL SOLIDARITY” and we do not find reference to this in the material released now by the UN Secretariat. The following material talks of two parallel routes – the Millennium Development Goals that stem from poverty, and a Sustainable Development route that is part of Development targets – albeit creating perhaps a route of future Sustainable Development Goals. It is imperative for the two to meet so that SDGs come in place after the MDG time has expired. But this is not all – the process as mandated, in our opinion, comes under the larger umbrella of SUSTAINABILITY THAT VIEWS FUTURE GENERATIONS AS A MAIN PARTICIPANT TO BE CONSIDERED IN WHAT THIS GENERATION DOES. SIMPLY SAID – WE FIND THAT THE UN SECRETARY-GENERAL’S ANNOUNCEMENT, AS PREPARED BY HIS SECRETARIAT, DOES NOT REFLECT IN FULL WHAT WAS DECIDED BY RIO+20 AND WE HOPE THAT AT LEAST SOME GOVERNMENTS WILL POINT THIS OUT. WE IN EFFECT FIND THIS ANNOUNCEMENT MISLEADING WHEN COMPARED TO THE MANDATE. ======================================================================
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 31st, 2012 FUTURE OF MEXICO’S NEW CLIMATE LAW A QUESTION UNDER PRESIDENT-ELECTPosted on July 31st, 2012 by Monica Molina
By Erin Parlar, Legal Intern Enrique Pena Nieto’s pending ascendancy to the presidency in Mexico has raised questions concerning his stance on climate change legislation recently enacted by current President Felipe Calderon. Under Calderon’s leadership, Mexico rose to the forefront of climate change politics, culminating in the national law he signed in June. It is unclear how Pena Nieto, who pledged in his campaign to increase Mexico’s GDP growth to around 6 percent each year, plans to implement the measure. Pena Nieto will represent the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) when he assumes the presidency this December, bringing back the party that had a 71-year reign over Mexico prior to its loss in the 2000 elections to the Vicente Fox-led National Action Party. It is believed that the change in parties is rooted in Mexico’s stagnant economic growth, which has averaged only 2.6 percent over the last 20 years. Pena Nieto ran on a platform that promised to reinvigorate a sagging industrial sector and reform Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, to allow for more private investment. Because much of PRI’s resources during Pena Nieto’s election run came from the industrial sector and his platform has focused largely on economic issues, policy experts believe that the president-elect will take a very cautious approach to Calderon’s climate change law in the first few years of his presidency. Mexico’s climate law aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent from business-as-usual levels by 2020 and by 50 percent by 2050. It also calls for a major increase in the use of renewable sources to supply up to 35 percent of all electricity consumption in the country and imposes mandatory reporting requirements on all major economic sectors. However, the legislation necessitates the implementation of several mechanisms, including financial incentives and an emissions trading system, to give its provisions full effect. As Calderon’s window of opportunity closes, all eyes are on Pena Nieto to see how he approaches the legislation. It is clear that the president-elect is in a privileged position regarding the future of Mexico’s approach to climate change. ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 31st, 2012 AFTER THE OUTCOME FROM RIO+20 EVERYBODY SHOULD RECOGNIZE BY NOW THAT OUR FIRST ORDER OF ECOLOGICAL RESPONSIBILITY IS TOWARDS THE FUTURE GENERATIONS – AND IF REASONED RIGHT, THIS LEADS US TO BEST ECONOMY-POLICY RESULTS AS WELL. That is our platform in the run-up to Rio 2012. —————————- Why climate change doesn’t spark moral outrage, and how it could.July 31, 2012
Perhaps the single biggest barrier to action on climate change is the fact that it doesn’t hit us in the gut. We can identify it as a great moral wrong, through a chain of evidence and reasoning, but we do not instinctively feel it as one. It does not trigger our primal moral intuitions or generate spontaneous outrage, anger, and passion. It’s got no emotional heat. (Ironic!) I (and countless others) have tried to explain, address, and overcome this aspect of climate change many times, in many different ways. But the single best thing I’ve read on it is a new paper in Nature Climate Change called “Climate change and moral judgment,” by Ezra Markowitz and Azim Shariff, of the University of Oregon Psychology and Environmental Studies departments respectively. In it, they “review six reasons why climate change poses significant challenges to our moral judgment system and describe six strategies that communicators might use to confront these challenges.” This is one of the most valuable things I’ve read on climate in ages, so it’s a damn shame it’s behind a pay wall. (I mean, it’s great, but I can’t in good conscience tell you to pay $32 for it.) To compensate for this unfortunate state of affairs, I’m going to quote from it liberally. Here’s the basic thesis:
They go on to identify six reasons why, “unlike financial fraud or terrorist attacks, climate change does not register, emotionally, as a wrong that demands to be righted.” Here’s a handy table: These are pretty self-explanatory, but here’s a bit more on each one: 1. Abstractness and cognitive complexity: Climate change is tough to understand. It “requires cold, cognitively demanding and ultimately relatively less motivating, moral reasoning.” People underestimate this. Very little that arrives in our worldview through a purely intellectual route ends up stirring the viscera. 2. The blamelessness of unintentional action: Nobody is heating the atmosphere on purpose. It is seen as an unintended side effect of other activities. And people treat intentional harms much more severely than they do unintentional harms. So “understanding climate change as an unintentional phenomenon with no single villain may decrease motivation to right past wrongs.” 3. Guilty bias: We’re all somewhat to blame for climate change. To avoid feeling guilt, shame, and regret over that, “individuals often engage in biased cognitive processes to minimize perceptions of their own complicity,” especially when “individuals and communities feel incapable of meaningfully responding behaviourally.” 4. Uncertainty breeds wishful thinking: It’s not clear exactly how climate change will play out, and “uncertainty about future outcomes generally increases self-oriented behaviour and … promotes optimistic biases.” When scientists communicate the probabilistic nature of climate impacts (for instance, through analogies like“loading the climate dice”), “recent research shows that individuals often misinterpret the intended messages … and tend to do so over-optimistically.” 5. Moral tribalism: Messaging about climate has tended to focus on liberal values (harms and unfairness) and disregard conservative values (loyalty, respect for authority, and purity/sanctity). As a result, many conservatives “have been left not just uninvolved in action on climate change, but morally hostile to it.” 6. Long time horizons and far away places: Victims of climate change are viewed as far away in space or time. “The consequence of this spatial and temporal distance is that victims of climate change are likely to be seen, at best, as relatively less similar to oneself than are nearby contemporaries, and at worst, as out-group members.” Climate victims are seen as Other, and you know how we tend to treat the Other. As a diagnosis of the difficulties climate change poses to our moral machinery, this all seems dead on to me. I’ve seen each one of these play out in miniature many times over the years. The authors then move on to their recommendations. As always in these sorts of discussions, I find the prescriptions somewhat less convincing than the diagnosis, but these are better than most. Some of them challenge assumptions cherished by me and other climate hawks. Here’s the handy table: Here’s a bit more on these, with some commentary: 1. Use existing moral values: This one is pretty familiar by now: “self-reinforcing, politically polarized discourse on climate change … might be overcome by highlighting consequences in which political conservatives are invested,” like corruption of the “sanctity of the natural world.” Over the years, I’ve heard many people try to pitch climate change to conservatives as a threat to national security (i.e., to order and authority) or the sanctity of God’s green earth. It never seems to get much traction or change anything. I myself harbor a dark suspicion that climate change simply isn’t a problem that submits to formulation in terms of conservative values. I remain to be convinced otherwise. 2. Burdens versus benefits: This one was interesting and counterintuitive to me: “Recent findings suggest that individuals are significantly more concerned over the ethical implications of saddling future generations with burdens than they are about providing benefits.” It turns out people are less motivated by a possible reduction in good things provided others than they are by a potential increase in bad things imposed on others. So the authors recommend “focusing messaging on the burdens that unmitigated climate change will leave on future generations (for example, higher adaptation costs, greater human suffering from disease) rather than on potential benefits (for example, a viable, vibrant planet).” I’m not sure I know exactly how to explain this, but it may just be that imposing something bad on people feels more intentional, more culpable, than leaving them with less of something good. Either way, it cuts against the cheery “future that makes sense” stuff I’ve been going on about, not to mention the general turn in the climate community toward promising great benefits from climate mitigation. Maybe Joe Romm’s “hell and high water” is what activates people after all. 3. Emotional carrots, not sticks: This seems somewhat in tension with No. 2. How exactly do you convince people that they are imposing burdens on others without making them feel guilty? But I’m definitely sold on the superior motivating power of positive emotions (the authors single out pride in particular). This gets at something I talk about a lot, which is how the climate movement might do a better job celebrating victories, scoffing at opponents, and putting on a little swagger. Fellow-feeling and pride will do more to keep people going than endless reinforcement of the hopelessness of the problem. 4. Be wary of extrinsic motivators: This one cuts directly against the most popular trend in climate messaging, which is emphasizing the economic growth and jobs that can come from climate mitigation. The authors acknowledge that sometimes engaging in climate mitigation for other reasons could “potentially lead to further pro-environmental attitude and behaviour change in an effort to avoid cognitive dissonance.” (This is known as the commitment effect — once we do something we’re inclined to act in ways consistent with that commitment in the future.) However, they say, “recent research demonstrates that promoting extrinsic values can actively inhibit individuals from developing intrinsic, non-materialist motives” and “consistent reliance on extrinsic incentives for a behaviour can crowd out pre-existing intrinsic attachments to that behaviour.” The lesson seems to be that economic (and other extrinsic) motivators might help some in the short term, but they are not a sufficient foundation for a long-term effort. I don’t know if I entirely buy this. What is the intrinsic motivation supposed to be? “Love of Mother Earth”? That’s not why I’m a climate hawk. I’m a humanist — I care about the welfare of people! I care about people, so I don’t want climate change to harm them. But for the very same reason, I’d like to see economic benefits and jobs come from climate mitigation. That motivation is not extrinsic to me. If only “love of planet” counts as intrinsic motivation for the climate fight, we’re in trouble. 5. Expand group identity: This one seems both obvious and difficult. It is certainly true that “framing the victims of climate change in ways that underscore shared goals and identities should similarly increase their moral standing, and with it, motivation to help them.” But how do you do that exactly? How do you increase fellow-feeling toward those who are spatially and temporally distant? I mean, I’d love it if Americans saw Bangladeshis as part of the human family. I’d love it if they saw the citizens of 2100, or 2300, as part of “us.” But they don’t seem to. Efforts in the past to grow fellow-feeling into a catholic, all-encompassing sentiment — Jesus’s efforts, for example — don’t seem to have succeeded very well. I’d like to hear a lot more about this one. 6. Highlight positive social norms: This is, to me, the Big Kahuna. As I was reading about all the psychological barriers to climate action, I kept thinking, “one thing can overcome all these: peer pressure!” If people see others that they view as peers or leaders doing something, they will tend to do it too, and retrofit reasons for it after the fact. This is the essence of humans as social creatures. The recommendation is twofold, though: not just to “highlight pro-environmental, prosocial injunctive norms such as prohibitions against being wasteful,” but also to “be careful not to inadvertently highlight negative, but existent, descriptive norms, which can actually encourage individuals to follow suit in the wrong direction.” In other words, you want to emphasize that climate hawkery is good, socially desirable, admirable, and that all the cool kids are doing it. You don’t want to give people the impression that “everyone’s doing it” if it is bad. Even if you state clearly that it’s bad, the fact that others are doing it is, in and of itself, a powerful incentive to do it too. It’s the herd instinct. This is good reason not to whine on and on about how everyone drives too much or everyone wastes electricity. The subtext is, “it’s the social norm.” – Aaaanyway, this is a lot of food for thought. But it’s the kind of stuff — not about science but about people — that far too many climate hawks ignore or disregard. Climate change is not only the economic and ecological crisis of our time, it’s also a moral crisis. What we are doing to our descendants is a moral crime. Finding ways to help people get that, feel it in their guts the way they would if someone threatened their own families, is a precondition for serious, sustained action. ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 26th, 2012 CULTURAL SURVIVAL The impulse for the founding of Cultural Survival arose during the 1960s with the “opening up” of the Amazonian regions of South America and other remote regions elsewhere. As governments all over the world sought to extract resources from areas that had never before been developed, the drastic effects this trend had on the regions’ Indigenous Peoples underscored the urgent need to partner with Indigenous communities to defend their human rights. Cultural Survival was founded to help Indigenous Peoples in their struggles for human rights, sovereignty, and autonomy.
Partnering with Indigenous Peoples to Defend their Lands, Languages, and Cultures
July 25, 2012
On July 7–8, 2012, members of 15 community radio stations partnering with Cultural Survival’s radio network across Guatemala gathered for a workshop in the Mujb’ab’l Yol training center in San Mateo, Quetzaltenango. The workshop focused on the difficult topic of historical memory of Guatemala’s 36-year armed conflict, which claimed the lives of 200,000 mostly Indigenous people. With the goal of using self-expression as a tool to alleviate trauma, participants wrote and Below, read one of the poems written by ex-combatant Rigoberta Gonzalez Sul, and member of the radio station Radio Ixchel. Written in Spanish, the poem is a call to women to be strong in the face of the traumas they experienced in the war. Romper el Silencio 36 años inolvidables y dolorosas, Breaking the Silence 36 unforgettable and painful years, ==================================
In the 1980s and 1990s, Cultural Survival created an economic strategy in order to bargain with governments who were ready to clear cut rainforests. Cultural Survival Enterprises (CSE) became a non-profit trading division that developed and marketed products generating income for Indigenous people who were struggling to protect their lands and traditions within rainforest regions. Cultural Survival Enterprises, spearheading the Fair Trade movement, was launched to help Indigenous groups receive a greater profit from their sold goods, however, after considerable debate among the board and staff and due to complications with the supply, it was decided to no longer support this program. Ellen L. Lutz became director of Cultural Survival in 2004 and transformed the organization over the next six years, strongly emphasizing human rights and advocacy areas in which she had an international reputation. For 25 years, Cultural Survival labored with many Indigenous activitst to win United Nations adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Ellen played a key role in helping shepherd this long process and on September 13, 2007, the UN General Assembly adopted a visionary text that set the global standard for how governments must treat Indigenous Peoples. An offshoot of these efforts, Cultural Survival started partnering with Guatemalan nongovernmental organizations to create a thriving network of over 200 community radio stations across Guatemala, many of which broadcast in one or more of the country’s 23 indigenous languages. The stations offer news, educational programming, human rights and health information, and traditional music, all reinforcing pride in Mayan heritage. In 2007, Cultural Survival turned its attention on the much-needed revitalization of critically endangered Native American languages. Cultural Survival partnered with tribal governments, foundations, corporations, and businesses to persuade the United States Congress to fund legislation providing federal support for language immersion programs. In 2009, Ellen oversaw the merger of Cultural Survival and Global Response. Global Response, a nongovernmental organization, directs campaigns to protect Indigenous rights all around the world. Global Response has developed relationships with Indigenous communities in order to help them stop government abuse and exploitation of their lands and natural resources. Suzanne Benally (Navajo and Santa Clara Tewa from New Mexico) is the current executive director. Benally was the associate provost for institutional planning and assessment and associate vice president for academic affairs at Naropa University. She was a core faculty member in environmental studies and a member of the president’s cabinet. Under Suzanne’s direction, Cultural Survival is set to reflect a robust and inclusive role. “It is our goal to become a world leader in advocacy for Indigenous Peoples rights to their land, languages and cultures,” Suzanne says. “We fully intend to continue our efforts in creating a world in which Indigenous Peoples speak their languages, live on their lands, control their resources, hold on to their culture, and whose rights are honored in participating in broader society. We believe this entails deliberate collaboration. It is all about building bridges.” ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 17th, 2012
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Throughout the 1970s, Cultural Survival’s original founders David Maybury-Lewis (pictured right with Xavante elder Sibupa), Evon Vogt, Jr., Orlando Patterson, and Pia Maybury-Lewis functioned out of a space made available by Harvard’s Peabody Museum. The organization was incorporated in 1972 as a tax-exempt NGO in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since its inception, Cultural Survival has been at the forefront of the international Indigenous rights movement. Cultural Survival’s work has contributed to a revolution of empowerment for Indigenous Peoples around the world. In the first years Cultural Survival launched a publication program consisting of the Cultural Survival Newsletter and a series of Special Reports which eventually became the Cultural Survival Quarterly. Cultural Survival also introduced its annual bazaars, which display and sell Indigenous arts and crafts.
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