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Keynote address XXIII IAHR BiennialCongress, Ottawa, 21st August, 1989Mr. S. LewisPublished online: 19 Jan 2010.
To cite this article: Mr. S. Lewis (1990) Keynote address XXIII IAHR Biennial Congress,Ottawa, 21st August, 1989, Journal of Hydraulic Research, 28:2, 129-138, DOI:10.1080/00221689009499081
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Stephen Lewis startles the conscience of his audience!
IAHR Council is happy to be able to give you herewith the full text of the enthralling opening speech of the XXIII IAHR Biennial Congress, delivered by Mr. Stephen Lewis currently of Stephen Lewis Associates and former Ambassador and Permanent Representative for Canada to the United Nations. Professor Jack Lawson, President of IAHR was in the chair during the session when the address was delivered.
Mr. S. Lewis, Keynote speaker.
Keynote address XXIII IAHR Biennial Congress, Ottawa, 21st August, 1989
Thank you immensely for so friendly and congenial an introduction. I am delighted and honoured to attend this Congress. I feel entirely privileged to address the opening session. I'm in a state of unceasing delight at the opportunity to return to my own country after spending four years amongst the Philistines of Manhattan. So when one returns to a crucible of enlightenment, particularly at a conference such as this, my soul is positively palpitating with enthusiasm. I'm also delighted to return to mortal status. It's a pleasure more than I can normally describe to be referred to simply as Mr. Lewis, and to be able to discard all that titular nonsense which the diplomatic core so lavishly embraces, running around calling each other Mr. Ambassador, or worse still, your Excellency. I'm a Democratic Socialist; you can imagine what that did to my
Mr. Lewis approved the transcript of his address on 26th January, 1990.
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socialist soul. It's therefore intensely pleasing in this elegant and modest country, as Canada feels itself to be, to jettison titular self-aggrandizement, and to return to normal mortal activity. I have three disclaimers as I begin. Number One: I apologize for my reliance exclusively on the English language. I am one of those Canadians who is a hapless unilingual anglophone, and because I have reverence for language, I would not wish to do damage to the French language. Second, this is for me an absurdly early hour of the morning, it is undoubtedly for many of you an hour when you have been active for some time. I, on the other hand, regard it as indecent to have to disgorge a speech at 10:00 a.m. Just three days ago, for exotic health reasons, I stopped drinking coffee, and I am subject to serious withdrawal symptoms. If I should expire during the course of my remarks, I ask you to allow compassion to prevail. Finally, as all of you will recognize, I have utterly no expertise in the domain with which the IAHR is consumed. That hasn't stopped me before and it won't stop me today from making pronouncements that may be uninformed. But I do want to make it clear that I don't pretend to have a grip on the subject matter as such, although having read your programme, I realize that there are people in this audience, indeed all of you collectively, of enormous knowledge and authority, and I need not feel self-conscience about my own intellectual impotence. On the other hand, I think it fair to say that I found most of the subject matters of the research papers entirely incomprehensible. I read the titles and the subjects to my family last night around the dinner table and they looked at me with a faintly bizarre expression. It means, therefore, that I am speaking to an audience more than skilled in the intricacies, details and complexities of your own fields, and I want you therefore to allow me to wander a little and deal, as was suggested to me by the Conference organizers, with the Effects of Global Change, and put it in a context which all of you will find initially, faintly unorthodox, but I hope that by the time I have reached the end of my remarks the coherence will appear. I want to begin, as you can perhaps anticipate, by reverting to my experience at the United Nations as a peg on which to hang some opening observations. At the UN, as a Canadian, with a certain celebratory nostalgia. I am delighted with what I see has happened within the UN context.
Positive shift in international relationships The United Nations, an organization that was so often vilified and abused over the last many years by detractors on the right and on the left, sometimes informed, often witless and destructive - the United Nations has suddenly come into its own. It is experiencing an astonishing renaissance in international approval, culminating in the winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, as all of you know, for peace keeping in 1988. When one looks back, it can be seen that things began to move, roughly at the end of 1987. Some historians may say that it coincides with the promulgation of Glasnost by Mikhail Gorbachev in September 1987. But things internationally over the last couple of years, began to focus on the United Nations, and between and among the super powers and related countries, in a way none of us would have thought imaginable just four or five years ago. I point out to you that the Soviet troops left Afghanistan; the Iran/Iraq war has reached a certain rapprochement and the carnage has, at least for the moment, ended; we may be on the verge of a certain breakthrough in Southern Africa - certainly we will see the independence of Namibia by the end 1990; it would appear that Vietnam will withdraw from Cambodia; it looks as though there can be peace in Central America if the Agreement of the five presidents recently reached is adhered to. In a variety of arenas around the world there are intractable regional conflicts which bedeviled and corrupted international society, and took a terrible toll on human kind. Those conflicts,
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within the last couple of years, have unexpectedly come to a certain resolution, and along with the resolution of regional conflicts there has been activity on the front of arms control and disarmament that seems, in retrospect, again unimaginable. At the end of 1987, the Soviet Union and the United States signed a medium-range missile accord. The super powers are now seriously discussing a short-range missile accord in Eastern and Western Europe. There are discussions of conventional arms reduction in Eastern and Western Europe. The super powers are contemplating strategic arms reduction. The whole world is gathered, examining the prohibition of chemical, bacteriological and radiological weapons. It is an extraordinary shift in international political relationships, all of which, I am going to argue, have fundamental application to the work you do; and all of it occurring within the last couple of years. It is as though the hands of the doomsday clock have been pulled back from midnight and given humankind a breathing space. And it's utterly contagious, you know. The horrors that the world witnessed in Tienanmin Square may be extremely difficult for many of us to cope with emotionally and intellectually, but on the other hand, it demonstrated the power of international dissent. And if one looks at what is happening in Poland today, let alone the Soviet Union and some of the satellite countries, then it is a positive liberation of the human spirit, again in a fashion which was utterly beyond contemplation a few short years ago.
Economic divide between the developed and the developing world greater than ever I make these points at the outset to demonstrate what we all know, but what I think I can also demonstrate to be germane to my thesis. And that is, that there has been an astonishing sequence of political victories internationally since the fall of 1987; but what I want to point out to you, and I point it out with some considerable sadness verging on despair, there has been no equivalent activity on the economic front. The political front, yes; the economic front, no. Indeed in all my adult life, in international terms, I have never seen it worse. I have never seen a greater divide between the developed and the developing world. There is no North/South dialogue. There are no global negotiations. There is a consistent abandonment of the developing world by the developed world on every front. It is desolating to imagine that those of us privileged enough to live in the developed world can consign hundreds of millions of people nay, billions of people, to a kind of permanent impoverishment, as the developed world secures its own wealth and privilege with enormous determination. Every single index by which we measure the future prospects for the developing world is in decline. Trade is in decline. Investment is in decline. Commodity prices are declining. Foreign aid is declining. Debt and debt service obligations positively strangle any prospects for economic recovery. There is also the emergence of the great international trading blocs. The North American Free Trade Alliance on one hand; the emergence of Europe in 1992 as the consummate international trading arrangement, 323 million people, $5 trillion of economic activity, twice that of Japan, more than that of the United States; and, Japan as the centerpiece of the Pacific Rim. All of these international trading blocs which are becoming the sine qua non of economic activity in the 1990's are sealing the fate of the developing world, utterly abandoned in the process.
Transfer of resources from the developed to the developing world essential to solution of environmental crises It seems to me that it is vital to recognize the curious equations or discontinuities which are occurring. On the one hand, this extraordinary political activity with all of the hope that it
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engenders; on the other hand the refusal by the same major political powers to do something about the riveting economic injustices internationally. That, in turn, has enormous consequences for all of the environmental problems which you collectively will be examining, because you can't solve the environmental problems today without international collaboration. You cannot expect the developing world to collaborate with the developed world in the solution of environmental crises unless there is a transfer of resources. But there is absolutely no suggestion anywhere that the developed world, which is so seized of environmental imperatives, is prepared to make the kind of transfer of technology, knowledge and resources which is necessary to provide for the necessary collaboration, which in turn is indispensable to a solution. As a matter of fact, let me give you a couple of figures which makes the point as powerfully as I would wish it to be made. Ten years ago, in 1979, the Developed World transferred to the Developing World net $40 billion. That is to say, the Developed World gave to the Developing World $40 billion over and above all of the payments it received by way of debt and debt servicing, etc. In 1989, ten years later, the Developing World, including the poorest countries on the face of the earth, pay net to the Developed World, $50 billion. That is, over and above all that we invest in them, trade with them, give to them by way of foreign aid - they return to us, net, over and above that - $50 billion. A shift of $90 billion in ten years! Now when you're dealing with environmental crises, when you're dealing with the implications which this world is now wrestling with, and when one understands the need to give to the Developing World the kind of capacity and resources necessary to respond, I want someone to explain to me how that is humanly possible when all of the momentum is in the opposite direction. It takes me again to the environment, because it is around the environment that international society must be engaged.
Environmental crisis coming to attention You will surely agree with me that the environmental preoccupation, the "idee fixe" of the environment, in 1989, is again an astonishing metamorphosis in a very few years time. In my country, in Canada, you can't turn around without having another dimension of the environmental crisis coming to attention. We have, in Canada, a renowned international scientist and writer and thinker whose name will be known to you, a lovely and remarkable fellow named David Suzuki. For the last five weeks on one of the major Canadian CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Sunday programs, David Suzuki has done an hour-long documentary each week called "A Matter of Survival" - a stunning compendium of all of the environmental issues internationally. I'm not his agent, but there are tapes and transcripts available and for anyone who cares about the environment internationally, these CBC programs were really quite remarkable. So far they have received, I am told, up to 10,000 letters from Canadians in response to the program. That is almost unbelievable in terms of a simple radio broadcast, and all of the letters are letters of anxiety and concern, all of them asking what individual Canadians might do. I noticed just yesterday in the international press the reference to the new study being done in the United States on the loss of species and biological diversity throughout the world: another stunning demonstration of the capacity of the world to be self-destructive. In my country, at the moment, we are attempting to persuade other countries, particularly the United Kingdom, to receive a large shipment of PCBs as a result of a fire in the Province of Quebec. The United Kingdom is refusing to accept the ship carrying the PCBs. The unions are refusing to offload the containers of PCB contaminant, and the government is notably exercised. You have to ask yourself why a country like Canada, which is
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not exactly an impoverished society, has to send its wastes across the seas in order to handle an environmental catastrophe which occurred at home. Everywhere one turns, regardless the country, environmental considerations are the fundamental preoccupation. Of course, almost all of it stems from the remarkable report which everybody here has presumably committed to memory, "Our Common Future", Madame Gro Harlem Brundtland's World Commission report on environment and development tabled in the United Nations in 1987.
If the problem of poverty is not dealt with, the developing world will not be able to collaborate in the saving of the environment One of the great pleasures of my young career, if I may put it that way, was that I sat in the General Assembly - if memory serves me it was October 5th, 1987 - when Madame Gro Harlem Brundt-land took the podium and tabled the report formally to the International Community. It was an electric moment; a galvanic moment. One could sense in the room all of the individual countries suddenly focussed on environmental issues in a way which had never occurred before. She was followed almost immediately by Rajiv Gandhi, by Robert Mugabe speaking on behalf of the non-aligned, by the head of the European Economic Community, and by a number of Ministers of the Environment from all over the World, including Canada. The most interesting speech initially was perhaps made by Robert Mugabe who said, in effect, to the Congress (I am rephrasing, but I think with accuracy), "Look, those of you in the Western World, if you view the Brundtland Commission report as though it is merely another report on Acid Rain, or waste disposal, or radioactive nuclear wastes; or pollution in the classic western definition, we are really not interested. Until the developed world deals with the problem which is at the root of the Developing World response, namely the problem of poverty, then we will not be able to collaborate with you in the saving of the environment." It was quite a moment: notice was given to the Developed World that we couldn't have it on our terms. But possibly the most vivid moment of the response to the Brundtland Commission report came in the speech from the President of the Maldives, when he talked about the problems of sea levels rising, and put it this way to the General Assembly of the United Nations: "The predicted effects of the change are unnerving, there will be significant shoreline movement and loss of land, a higher mean sea level would inevitably increase frequency of inundation and exacerbate flood damage, it would inundate fertile deltas, causing loss of productive agricultural land and vegetation and increase saline encroachment into aquafers, rivers and estuaries. The increased costs of reconstruction, rehabilitation, and strengthening of coastal defence systems, could turn out to be crippling for most affected countries." And he made at times an emotional appeal to the rest of the world, to come to the rescue of his own country, and to come to the rescue of other countries that would similarly be under assault. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have two things to say about that. Number One; Global Warming, the Greenhouse Effect is now at the centerpiece of International Environmental concern, as everyone in this room knows. The question of the Greenhouse Effect, the Warming Effect around the World has enormous implications for anybody who is concerned with water as a resource, and ultimately, as a potential source of extraordinary international devastation. The second thing I want to say, which I think is interesting, is that the question of Global Warming was not significantly dealt with in the Brundtland Commission Report. It pains me to say that, but it is worth noting that this whole report on environment and development dealt with the question of the Greenhouse Effect in a fairly facile fashion. As recently as 1987, the full consequence
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and impact of climate change was not yet the centerpiece of international environmental concern. It was largely the drought in the middle of 1988 which galvanized the World.
Sealevel rise may lead to some 50 million environmental refugees by the year 2050 But the World is now well and truly ordered around the subject matter. I think it is generally agreed that the process of Global Warming which has been unleashed, and which will double the warming trends in the next 100 years, will mean a one and a half to four and a half degree Celsius temperature rise, probably by the year 2050. That means sea level rises of 1 metre by that time, and that is a minimum extrapolation. Now whatever else is said, and there is a large area of dispute and controversy which I readily acknowledge, there seems to be a general consensus of scientific opinion that an increase of 1 metre by the year 2050 is highly likely. The consequences of such a sea level rise, are so potentially catastrophic as to unsettle even the most inured of observers. Take a country like Bangladesh. If the rise which is predicted occurs, it will flood up to 18% of the country by the year 2050, displacing more than 17 million people. I want you to recall the disruptions which occurred as recently as the fall of 1988, when two thirds of Bangladesh went under water. Part of it was caused by monsoon rains, but a lot of it was caused by the disruption of the hydrological cycle in the Himalayan Watershed, because of deforestation. Thus, it is again confirmed that one of the important realities of the environmental crisis is that everything is linked, so that the pressure for cropland in the watershed has resulted in one-half to three-quarters of the middle mountain ranges in Nepal and India being deforested in the last 40 years, and Bangladesh's land and soil cover is receiving such a series of assaults on its integrity that it is almost impossible for the human imagination to cope with it. It is certainly impossible for mere vocabulary to describe it. But if the consequences of climate change are as predicted, you will have 17 million people displaced in Bangladesh somewhere within the next 50 to 60 years, and if the warmer climates and the higher seas occur, and the storms become more aggravated and more frequent, then the results are even more horrific. There are those who go as far as to argue that Bangladesh will effectively disappear as a country, as we know it, by the middle of the 21st century. I refuse to accept that proposition but there are those who raise the spectre. Take a look if you will at Egypt. I hope to be off at a Conference on Climate Change which is being held in Egypt between December 17 and December 21, (1989) which some of you will know about. It's a Conference determined to look at Egypt, and at the whole of the African continent. For Egypt, where most of the country is semi-desert, the population derives its food and habitat effectively from 4% of the land which is habitable and cultivatable. If, in fact, the warming effect proceeds as the scientists are predicting, and there is a metre rise by the year 2050, then 20% of the land will be unlivable, 16% of the gross national product will be gone, and 8.5 million people will be homeless. I have already mentioned the Maldives. The point that the President of the Maldives makes again and again is that his country consists of 1190 islands and antilles, with the highest elevation never exceeding two metres. If the projected rise in sea level is real, then the Maldives could have disappeared by the end ofïhe 21st century! And that is not mere conjecture; it seems to conform to the present warming trends. Let me also note that the IAHR has numbers of members from the Netherlands. One knows that in The Netherlands you have, if memory serves me, some 400 kilometers of sophisticated diking, and 200 kilometers of sophisticated sand-dune protection, and 8 million people who live in the reclaimed delta. And even though The Netherlands is a country of remarkable technological
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expertise, and some considerable wealth, it will be stretched to the outer limits if, in truth, the warming effect takes effect as it is predicted to do. Now these are the most dramatic kinds of examples which can be raised. But I want to point out to you, as experts, the consequences that flow from them. I was fortunate enough to chair the Conference on the Changing Atmosphere in Toronto, in June of 1988. There were 300 scientists and policy makers from all over the world. They came to all of these same conclusions by consensus. I then was in Washington in December of 1988 at an astonishing conference on climate which involved some 700-800 scientists from around the World, in which the same arguments were advanced in a fashion largely irrefutable. There have been numbers of conferences since on climate change, that all of you will be familiar with, and the same prognosis was advanced. I ask you to think of it for a moment in human terms. If you and your colleagues are right about the rise in sea levels as a consequence of climate change, we will have 50 million environmental refugees in this World by the year 2050. That is four times the number of international refugees we now have from all of the more traditional sources of civil war and civil disruption! I think that one could argue that there are already 10 to 13 million environmental refugees in this World as a result of land degradation and desertification, plus the large refugee movements, particularly on the continent of Africa, struggling for some kind of subsistence, moving into urban conglomerations, destroying the possibility of life in many areas of the continent because of the huge numbers of peoples being shifted from country to country and place to place as the result of drought and famine. But when you add the consequences of climate change to that awful spectre, then one has the prospect of 50 million people in a category which this World has never struggled with before. It is no accident that in the International Human Rights community they are now discussing the question of the human rights of environmental refugees. They have never dealt so fully with that category before in the refugee community, and all of this requires an astonishing response by informed people in order to turn it around. Everyone in this room is aware of what is happening as a result of climate change, and I don't want to insult your collective intelligence by overdoing it. There is sure to be debate and conjecture about rates and extent and repeatability and pattern, but the unleashing of the warming effect is now everywhere acknowledged, and almost all are agreed that the changes to the international environment will be dramatic and severe.
Water related implications of climate change All of the conferences which I have mentioned, and all of the conferences which are coming, are increasingly focussed on the water related implications. Again, and again, the points are driven home. For example, take the decline in water quality around the world, sticking to questions of drinking and sanitation in the Developing World in particular. Do you know that in all of West Africa, only 5% of the population have sewer connections of any formal kind? And as changes in the hydrological complex occur, then inevitably there is increasing environmental instability. For example; the spread of water-borne disease. Eighty percent of the diseases in the Developing World are of course associated with water, and if there is a warming effect, however marginal, the increased incidence of those diseases can be calculated, and are now being discussed in more widespread fashion than was previously the case. When you juxtapose the increase of water-borne diseases with, for example, a pandemic like AIDS on the African continent, the combination of the two is devastating. Take, moreover, the role of the oceans, and recognize how urgent is the need for international
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concensus on protection of economic zones, and coastal regions and the sea-bed itself. Yet, the painful truths that numbers of countries still have not signed or ratified the Law of the Sea leaving potential harm and damage to the oceans as an open possibility. Take, furthermore, the less catastrophic consequences of sea level rise for beaches and tourist areas from the United States to the Caribbean. Many of you will have seen the study of the consequences of sea level rise for Miami, for Cleveland, for New York. Extraordinary increases in costs associated with the preservation of urban infrastructure will be required. At the conference I was at in Washington in December, that study on Cleveland, Miami and New York engaged the attention of a great many of the scientists, particularly the water quality scientists who were there and raised the alarm bells. Take, yet again, the water logging and salinization of irrigated land. One must remember that 18% of the World's crop land is under irrigation and it provides 43% of the World's food. Although the number of hectares coming under irrigation is now in relative decline, for reasons of water logging and salinization, and even though the problems go back, for God's sake, to Mesopotamia, we've never been able to work out adequate drainage arrangements. The fact of the matter is that we are loosing one million hectares a year of irrigated land for crop production; and another 40 million hectares out of a total of about 258 million are now considered moderately degraded. The consequences for those who are concerned about water resources and water quality are profound. I could go on forever chronicling questions of coastal and marine resources, of acid rain, of the relationship between water quality and food security, and what happens when you devastate the hydrologie cycles; the consequences of the drying up of riverbeds and lakebeds, the absence of moisture in the soils, the endless litany of despair which is detailed in document after document. I am putting it strongly, because I think it is important that it be put strongly to an audience of people who are concerned and can do something about it.
Interdisciplinary research needed to foresee climate and water resource change and their effects Everytime there is a gathering of international scientists and policy makers, everytime there is a gathering of people like yourselves dealing broadly with the implications of Global Climate Change, there is a focus on research. At the conference in Toronto in June of 1988, the Proceedings of which I brought along with me, there were endless numbers of specific recommendations for research application in an effort to make the case in a way that is unanswerable, and to provide some of the solutions. Those recommendations are set out chapter and verse, and although I was going to read the entire conference proceedings to you, it strikes me that I will be imposing gently on the coffee break which is imminent. Similarly, in the proceedings from the Washington conference there were equivalent emphases on research proposals for water resources, water quality, coastal areas, aquatic systems, etc. But there was one particular observation which flowed from Washington which I thought was particularly germane and therefore I want to read it to you: "We employed engineering, agronomy, ecology, history, economics and knowledge of practical management in anticipating impacts and responses to climate and water resource change. The relations between climate and water cut across the boundaries of the classic disciplines of science. Although separate research by different disciplines is not wasted, collaboration by scientists of diverse disciplines sharing questions, knowledge, and responsibilities is crucial. Since governments must solve problems to defend the nation or state they govern, a recommendation about science is directed to them." And this is the recommendation, rather poorly drafted perhaps, but the idea is well conveyed: "To foresee changes and effects of climate and water resources, takes interdisciplinary research. Until
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institutional and personnel problems such as funding and professional recognition are dealt with, interdisciplinary research will be hard to sustain in government, universities, or anywhere. Governments need a knowledge of future climate and water resources and should encourage interdisciplinary research by their rules and money." Now the reason I read that to you is that if the scientists of this World are right, everyone understands that the consequences can be apocalyptic; consequences for the low lying coastal regions, consequences for the process of desertification, consequences for the agricultural heartlands of Canada, the United States, the Soviet Union, all of which countries are already feeling the implications of climate change. The necessity to research all of the subject matter and to make the case, and to discuss the solutions is of course fundamental. But it isn't enough. It doesn't begin to be enough, because one must have a governmental response, and what we have had up until now is a governmental response internationally which is largely rhetorical; almost entirely bereft of substance. One thing that governments seem reluctant to do is to make any shifts in public policy which embrace the commitments they make rhetorically - my government included. We understand that if the Greenhouse Effect is to be changed, then the discharge of carbon into the atmosphere must be dramatically reduced. That means that there must be an equivalent dramatic reduction of the combustion of fossil fuels by 50%, perhaps by the year 2050, and more than that, there must be an enormous regeneration of tree planting around the world - the WorldWatch Institute argues for 15 billion trees for 15 years in order to recultivate or reforest 130 million hectares. At that level for the next 15 years you might be able, in combination with fossil fuel combustion and carbon reduction, to stay the on-set of the Warming Effect. But I point out to you, that whether you go to The Hague and sign a declaration, or whether you talk about a Convention on the Changing Atmosphere in 1992, you are largely dealing in rhetorical affirmations of the obvious. Until there is a change in public policy then everything which the scientists document, everything which the research shows, comes to naught. It is terribly important to have scientific expertise in terms of consciousness-raising, and in terms of its actual or potential application. But a simple technological fix is never enough. One has to engage the political will of governments. And that leads me to say to you, and I must say it because I think it is almost a moral imperative, that what is required from organizations like the IAHR is the dimension of advocacy.
Organizations like the IAHR have to raise the consciousness of politicians Research scientists tend not to think of themselves as advocates. They prefer to do their research, and they prefer to put forward the analysis and recommendation to ameliorate international conditions. But what is required from researchers now, in this fight against time, is an effort to force those who make the decisions into policy changes which will give expression to human needs. Never has that been more vital. There is no reason in the world why organizations of this kind cannot mount an unrelenting lobby to raise the consciousness of politicians, and to engage society in a similar effort which speaks to the survival of the planet. I know that people in this room are not inclined to mount the barricades. I'm over 50 now; I'm inching to my dotage, I don't want to go to the barricades either, but I do know that the power and the force of the informed scientist can shift opinion and bring pressure in a way that can make a change to the future of this planet. One final thought. There will be those of you who worry deeply about the central questions: the need to transfer resources in order to save the environment. And then you ask the vital related question: where is the money going to come from? Let me perhaps end on that note.
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The way it all comes together symmetrically, is that the advances on the political front make possible the freeing of resources for other human imperatives. It is the simple equation between disarmament, development and environment. If we are truly launched on a course which will result in a significant reduction in the arms race, and the freeing of resources from military purposes, then those who care about international environmental priorities must make sure that some of those resources are used to deal with the developmental and environmental realities which are so pervasive and urgent. To that end, your collective role is absolutely central. I honour you for it, and I salute you for it, and I thank you for the opportunity of having me here this morning. Thank you.
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4 N
ovem
ber
2014
