How do we cope with an unending series of polycrises facing the world? This summer was the hottest ever recorded with daily reports of floods and natural disasters. The AI revolution is disrupting jobs and business. The media fog of war in Ukraine is so bad that no one knows who is winning or losing, except that thousands are dying or being maimed by the day. Debt is reaching distress levels, even as interest rates remain high.
Geopolitically, the UN Secretary General is calling the situation an “unhinged world” because nothing was agreed at the last UN Security Council meeting, when President Biden was the sole leader out of five Permanent Members present. No one seemed to be in charge of global security.
In almost all areas needing global cooperation, such as dealing with recession, food security and AI regulation, trust and action are lacking. So far only 12 per cent of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) for 2030 have been met.
This feeling of dystopia means that few can trust any leader to lead us out of the looming apocalypse. The issues are so multi-dimensional that no single solution is adequate. Cli- mate warming is complex systems change that is simultaneously changing humanity and the planet. There is no silver bullet solution because it involves human behavioural change that is hardwired to excessive consumption, powered by debt printing, that increases carbon emission and ecological destruction.
Even as scientists warned about the physical dimension of climate warming, economists were sanguine because they thought that the solution was either through the state imposing carbon taxes or through trading carbon credits or debits so that the market would solve the problem. Since businesses control politics, most democracies refused to impose carbon taxes, and without governments to impose the right regulations, carbon markets are in disarray, if not outright scams.
What are we to do?
The state or market are top-down solutions, whereas throughout history, mass change has often been bottom-up, through diverse societies and communities finding their own way out of natural or human challenges, sometimes through revolution. The British historian Arnold Toynbee argued that civilization evolved through “challenge and response”. Western civilizations will fail when its elites refuse to deal with the challenges of natural disasters or social corruption and injustices.
Most people do not understand why they have to fix carbon emission by one indicator (Net Zero), whereas their daily priority is to get enough income to feed their families. The politicians have not made clear that protecting Human Capital (our well-being) and Natural Capital (the planetary wellbeing) are one and the same thing. This is rightly recognized by Pope Francis, in his latest Apostolic Exhortation “Laudate Deum” as “our care for one another and our care for the earth are intimately bound together.” Quite rightly, the Pope sees cli- mate change as a moral challenge.
However, he also recognized that our current technocratic paradigm seeking limitless growth and econom- ic power has gone awry. “The ethical decadence of real power is disguised thanks to marketing and false information, useful tools in the hands of those with greater resources to employ them to shape public opin-ion.”
Change management is not rock- et science. Corporate management consultants know that transforming business models involves shared values, ownership of the need for change, a strategy to effect change and institutional/organizational reforms that incentivise the change. The complexity facing global change is the scale and diverse scope of communities, cultures and values with different resources and history.
Ultimately, any change involves sacrifices and trade-offs, which is why it takes leaders who will take the risks and also raise funding to effect the transformation. Since climate disasters affect the poor the most, which exacerbates social injustice, we need to address how to raise incomes to alleviate social inequality, whilst at the same time tackle the stresses on the environment.
As the book, “Buying Time for Climate Action” showed, there is already readily available technical and organisational knowhow, as well as global funding, to effect the SDGs. Most of the knowhow exists in universities and businesses, but is not available readily for the millions of villages and small social activists to effect change. The Digital Divide is also the Poverty Divide.
I can only conclude that it is the profit model of business that has ignored climate change for too long. It took 10 years for the business sector to realize that climate change is not an expense reducing their profits, but a profit opportunity. As long as they are still making money because central banks are willing to print to pro- vide the profit illusion, little will change.
UNCTAD’s latest Trade and Development Report 2023 showed how the top four global companies in food trading, accounting for nearly 70 per cent of global food market share, registered dramatic rise in profits during 2021–2022. The same has happened with fertilizer, energy, pharmaceuticals and other key commodities, even as billions struggle to access basic access to food and health.
The rich West has become more selfish and protective of their status quo. Even Sweden, formerly a generous exemplar of funding development aid, has decided to cut such aid, due to pressure from its new right-wing government. Effectively, Sweden and other European countries will cut their commitments to providing 0.7 per cent of GDP to annual Overseas Development Aid (ODA) partly to finance their NATO defense spending commitment of 2 percenct of GDP.
Are we apes fighting over a burning planet?
As long as the rich West is unwilling to take the risk of funding and leading the Rest in global climate action and addressing social inequities, it has lost the moral right to be world leader. And the corruption of morality by the rich elites is exactly what historian Arnold Toynee attributed to the decline and fall of civilizations.
Basically, if top leaders and business captains are not willing to listen to the Pope’s sincere plea to his global flock of 1.3 billion Catholics, we are all doomed to be boiled frogs.
(The writer is a former central banker who writes on global issues from an Asian perspective.)
Special to ANN.