Kofi Annan has climate change on the brain.
The former United Nations Secretary-General, who is now also a Columbia University Global Fellow, took his World Leaders Forum lecture as an opportunity to highlight the urgency of stopping global warming, which, he said “risks becoming the main restraint on development, reversing significant progress.”
Annan pointed out the injustice inherent in the effects of climate change. “It is a tragic irony,” he said, that developing countries have contributed less than two percent of the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, yet suffer most from the effects.
As an example, he pointed to Kiribati, a small Pacific island that is deeply impacted by rising sea levels and may need to be evacuated sooner than anticipated. Poor countries, especially those in Africa, are already suffering from desertification and drought as a result of climate change. Those countries will also suffer most from the spread of disease, which is rising at a rate that corresponds to global temperatures.
Annan is hopeful that a fair agreement can be reached in Copenhagen when world leaders come together for the U.N. Climate Change Conference on Dec. 7, 2009.
“Fairness means implementation of the ‘polluter pays’ principle. This should apply to countries, to companies, institutions, as well as individuals,” he said.
Annan emphasized the importance of student involvement in fighting climate change.
“In college, you have lots of young people who share your ideas, professors to steer you in the right direction,” he said, adding, “I’ve seen young people come together” to “do amazing things.” He suggested writing to your state representatives to move the issue up on the U.S. agenda, and using all tools available to start grassroots movements that encourage individual, corporate, and governmental environmental responsibility.
Eric Zavesky, a Ph.D. student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences , was glad Annan advised students to use social networking and other modern tools in order to increase grass roots movements, rather than simply rely on government and big corporations.
This message also resonated with Mariel Davis, CC ’09. She said it was important to hear Annan stress the “importance of coordinating a new generation who are informed,” and that “new voices are necessary and will help to amplify the existing push” for stopping climate change.
Zavesky said he is glad to see the dialogue on climate change shifting from a use of dense “scare tactics” to what he thinks is a more empowering approach: relating the daunting issue of the climate crisis to more relatable elements of daily life, like food, and showing people how they can individually take part in reducing emissions.
The lecture’s ending was a first for a World Leaders Forum event: it closed with a music video, a covere of Midnight Oil’s 1987 hit single “Beds Are Burning.” The video, created for the TckTckTck campaign—a movement to ensure that a fair deal is struck in Copenhagen in December—is described as a “musical petition” and features artists like Fergie and Duran Duran, as well as global citizens like Kofi Annan and Desmond Tutu.
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