HRH Prince Charles on ES, climate change and resilience
February 22, 2011 Leave a comment
This video is a good one for a tea break call to action.
Tea Time Talk
Prince Charles covers a lot of ground in the video below including Ecosystem Services, GDP linkages to externalities not being accounted for, forests, fisheries and aquaculture, perverse subsidies, kudos on reporting to certain groups, the history of TEEB, public private partnerships with NGO input, not leaving things to the market alone, the market-mechanism potentials that may be effective in incentivizing sustainable ends, and the role of the consumer in demanding sustainable products and services.
His final comments are the most persuasive:
“Lately I’ve been asking myself on why the public has not eagerly embraced many of the advantages in pursuing a sustainable future. My conclusion is that for too long environmentalists have concentrated on the things that we need to stop doing. If we are constantly told that means giving up all that makes life worthwhile, then it is no surprise that people refuse to change.
That is why last year I launched a new initiative called ‘Start‘ which aims to show people what they could start doing. The simple steps that we can all take to make better use of our natural resources…We are unashamedly trying to sell the benefits of sustainability…We are making it cool to use less stuff. Believe it or not, this smarter approach can actually be more profitable. As Marks and Spencer have found an innovative approach to sustainbility actually saves money.
Now I have to say this process has not exactly been helped by the corrosive effect on public opinion of those climate change skeptics who deny the vast body of scientific evidence that shows beyond any reasonable doubt that global warming has been exacerbated by human industrialized activity. Their suggestion that hundreds of scientists around the world, and those who accept their dispassionate evidence, including presumably (ladies and gentlement) myself, who rather ironically am constantly accused of being anti-science, who are somehow unconsciously biased creates the implication that many of us are somehow secretly conspiring to undermine and deliberately destroy the entire market-based capitalistic system that now dominates the world.
So I would ask, how these people are going to face their grandchildren and admit to them that they actually failed their future? That they ignored all the clear warning signs by passing them off as merely part of a cyclical process that had happened many times before and was beyond our control. That they had refused to heed the desperate cries of those last remaining traditional societies throughout the world who warned consistently of catastrophe because they could read the signs of impending disintegration in the ever more violent extreme aberrations in the normally harmonious process of nature.
So I wonder, will such people be held accountable at the end of the day for the absolute refusal to countenance a precautionary approach? For this plays, I would suggest, a most reckless game of roulette with a future inheritance of those who come after us. An inheritance, ladies and gentlemen, that will be shaped by what you decide to do here in this parliament.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. President, you’ve been remarkably patient at listening to me, and I promise you that what you decide here could induce the very necessary adjustments we so urgently we need to make. So can I ask if you will be courageous enough to seize the moment, set Europe on a course for survival and economic prosperity, and so earn the endless gratitude of our descendants.”
iES 