France’s ‘Green Revolution’?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy last night declared that his country would witness a “green” revolution which will cut the nation’s energy consumption and carbon emissions, reduce road and air transport and promote organic farming.

The Independent reports: M. Sarkozy hailed the two-day national meeting as an ‘important moment’ in a shift away from a ‘production and consumer’ society to a world which rejected ‘waste’ and accepted the need to defend the ‘future of the planet’.

‘He promised to implement all the agreements reached over two days by a conference of politicians, employers, trades unions, ecological pressure groups and farmers – claimed to be the first meeting of its kind in the world. The conference would, M. Sarkozy said, start a ‘revolution in our way of thinking, in our way of making decisions, a revolution in our way of life’.”

In another related development, nearly 400 experts from around the world who contributed to the recent United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report, warned that humanity itself could be at risk if nothing is done to address the three major environmental problems of a growing human population, climate change and the mass extinction of animals and plants, reports The Independent.

“The report is the fruit of five years’ work by leading scientists and is the fourth in a series since the publication in 1987 of Our Common Future by an international commission into the state of the global environment chaired by the former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.

“The world economy has at the same time boomed, with the global GDP per capita rising from about $6,000 (£2,920) to just over $8,000. But this increased wealth has been geared towards the developed world and has come at an enormous cost to the environment.

“Available freshwater stocks have declined dramatically since the 1980s, in west Asia, for instance, from 1,700 cubic metres per person per year, to 907 cubic metres today. By the middle of the century, this is likely to fall still further to 420 cubic metres per person per year.

“Over the past 20 years, the proportion of fish stocks in the world that have collapsed has doubled from 15 per cent to 30 per cent. At the same time the proportion of fish stocks that are deemed to be overexploited has risen from 20 per cent to 40 per cent.”

Achim Steiner, the executive director of UNEP, said that the objective of the latest report was not to present a ‘dark and gloomy scenario’ but to make the case for an urgent call to action. However, the dire state of almost every aspect of the planet’s wellbeing points to 20 years of missed opportunities.

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