‘To be or not to be, that is the question’…

‘To be or not to be’ is possibly the most well-known literary question of all. It is asked despairingly by Hamlet, the young prince of Denmark in the Shakespeare play of that name, while contemplating suicide, wracked with guilt, as he considers his fate and the actions that have led to it.

It is perhaps also the quintessential question which sums up, perhaps more than any other, the fate that faces humanity if the world leaders and negotiators who meet this May in Kunming (China) for COP15, the UN Biodiversity Conference – and this November in Glasgow for COP 26, the UN Climate Change Conference – do not act collaboratively and bravely on the twin challenges.

An existential crisis

The climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis facing the world are rightly described as existential crises of humanities’ own making, with a million species at imminent threat of extinction and the very foundations of human existence – clean air, fresh water, good quality soil and crop pollination, food, under threat as never before.

The burden lies with those countries which have continued to extract without reparation, to emit without solution, and to damage the single planet on which we live without understanding – or perhaps with understanding – the consequence of their actions.

Despite global agreements going back decades, those of us alive today have seen the potential for our own destruction being taken forward by the richest governments of the world at the expense of the poorest.

But every time the world leaders of the richest and poorest nations come together there is a new opportunity to act, and this year that existential question ‘to be or not to be?’ needs to be in everyone’s minds.

Time for long-term action

Governments are key in the context of global concerted actions, and this year, the majority of their populations are on-side. We know that the level of understanding about the impacts of climate change and the consequences of biodiversity loss is at its highest ever.

We know that young people across the world are calling for government action as never before. We know that the solutions are here now, and that we do not need to rely on untried and tested technologies to bring down our emissions or regenerate nature.

We also know that the actions necessary will involve a complete inversion of the way decisions are currently taken. For too long, actions of governments have been short-term, led by electoral cycles. They have pushed wicked problems downstream – nuclear waste and student debt come to mind.

Without adopting a new values framework that factors the interests of future generations into all government thinking and actions, it is hard think how our behaviour might change sufficiently to respond to the evidence that we see in our daily lives – the floods, the fires, the hurricanes, the melting of the ice, the warming of the atmosphere – all of which affect humans’ long-term survival.

At the COPs, countries will offer to contribute to global solutions, but no country has yet met either its climate or biodiversity targets. That must change at these important world meetings this year.

The Welsh example

In 2014, 193 UN member states also signed up to the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. I was surprised to find recently that so far there is still only one country, Wales, which has taken the democratic step to introduce a legislative values framework, the ‘Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act (2015)’, with 7 goals to underpin all the decision-making of its government and public services.

The Act contains explicit commitments to act on climate change, low carbon prosperity, enhancing biodiversity and living within our environmental limits.

The Welsh goals also include acting on inequality and the causes of ill health, fostering safe and cohesive communities, celebrating Welsh languages and culture and prohibiting off-shoring of emissions through the all-important ‘Globally Responsible Wales’ goal. This requires the government when acting to improve the economic, social, environmental and cultural well-being of Wales, to take account of whether the action will also contribute to global well-being.

Unusually, the Act does not just contain the goals but also how to achieve them. Known as the ‘5 ways of working’, the Act requires demonstrable long term thinking, preventative approaches, collaborative activity, integration of the goals and importantly, the involvement of those about whom decisions are being made.

While the goals are the ‘what’, the ways of working are the ‘how’. Overseen by a commissioner, audited by the Wales Audit Office, and ultimately challengeable in the courts, the Brundtland principle of sustainable development, which defines development as ‘meeting the needs of current generations without compromising on the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ is uniquely now incorporated into law in Wales.

Now, five years later, this law is starting to change culture and practice in Wales. Actions to create a circular economy, to be a zero waste nation, to plant a national forest that grows organically the length and breadth of the country, to farm agroecologically, to restore its peatbogs, to legislate for emission reduction, intertwine a climate and biodiversity approach.

A fundamental question

This approach is so fundamentally different to business as usual, it still presents a daily challenge to those trying to create the new systems to deliver on the new values framework.

However, that question, ‘to be or not to be?’ has never been more urgent and has never required more collaboration and commitment than we, the population to the world, need to see from the UN member states at the COPs this year.

Perhaps the experience of the small nation of Wales, in its attempt to create a values framework that recognises the need for integrated environmental, economic, social and cultural action to underpin all government decision-making can be helpful as members deliberate not just the ‘what’ but the ‘how’ to achieve a just transition.

So, ‘to be or not to be?’ is the question that needs to be answered this year for the future of humans and all the other species in nature.

At the first Earth Summit in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, one of the first principles was that humans have ‘the right to live in harmony with nature’. What humans have demonstrated is they may have that right, but they have not yet exercised that responsibility.

I hope that every delegate will have in their mind that existential question ‘to be or not to be?’ as they negotiate for all our futures, for all our species, for all time. John Rawls, the American philosopher said ‘Do unto future generations what you would have had past generations do unto you’. We should expect nothing less.

Jane Davidson is a former Welsh government minister (2000-2011) and author of a ‘#futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country’