Dear Mr. Director General,
Your Excellency the Minister,
UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, Professor Jean Malaurie,
Dear Ambassador,
Dear Professors,
Indigenous people,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Dear friends,
A few weeks ago, I was in Antarctica at the invitation of the scientists working there, to visit their facilities, discover their living conditions and testify to the importance of their task.
This journey was part of a long-term project, since I had already undertaken an equivalent expedition to the Arctic in 2006.
Barely three years have elapsed between these two voyages, and yet.
Despite the crisis that is shaking our world, environmental concerns have not waned; quite the contrary, as I was able to observe on my last expedition. I was able to feel directly how people's minds have opened up to a new solidarity with those distant lands that are so important to us.
Such attention can be explained, of course, by the International Polar Year, with its intense global agenda on climatic issues, and there was Barack Obama's recent election, with the avowed goal of making the environment one of the world's most powerful nation's main priorities.
Whatever the reason, the result is there: today's meeting would have been inconceivable only a few years ago.
I'm not saying no one would have been interested. No! I'm simply observing an essential difference: a profound mutation in people's minds that gives us great hopes today.
We can simply think of the indifference tinged with perplexity that preceded the 1992 summit in Rio, and compare it with the effervescence stirred up by the forthcoming Copenhagen Conference. Despite the financial crisis, despite the remaining uncertainty and controversy, we already have the certainty that the very nature of things has changed.
In a few years, Ladies and Gentlemen, we have witnessed a revolution: for 4,000 years, humans spent a large part of their energy plundering the Earth's resources and destroying their natural environment, heedless of the consequences of their acts.
This trend is in the process of being reversed. Of course, the power of the technologies developed for a century makes the damage already incurred all the more difficult to control. And we are only at the beginning of a very long process, but we cannot predict if it will achieve the lofty ambitions we all share. Today, however, we do know the world can change.
From now on, we can build on increasingly reliable scientific facts. The researchers I met in Antarctica last month, those scientists of the IPCC rightly rewarded with the Nobel
Peace Prize, those men and women who devote their lives to our Planet, now offer us the means for taking action.
Thanks to them, thanks to the intelligence they mobilize, there is cause for optimism.
Even the crisis I just mentioned, by bringing back to the fore concerns that remained marginal for too long, like the search for alternatives to fossil fuel, offers its share of good news.
These reasons for hope now come from all sides. From Europe, obviously, where a very broad rise in awareness pushes societies and governments to seek inventive resolute approaches.
I will obviously not list all the measures taken in each country, since each one advances at its own rhythm and sets its own priorities.
But how can we not be proud of the new dynamism of community policies addressing this? How can we not be satisfied with the constructive meeting organized here in Monaco a few
months ago by the French Presidency of the European Union on scientific cooperation between Arctic observation systems?
Its conclusions opened major new possibilities, and I have no doubt that, tomorrow, they will lead to very concrete advances in both Europe and the Arctic.
As I just said, there are also reasons to be hopeful that come to us from the United States of America, where the Obama administration is deploying efforts in favour of the Planet on an unprecedented scale.
And we know that, in all countries, the movement is gaining momentum, even if it is sometimes barely perceptible.
It must be remembered that governments are not alone. They are accompanied and sometimes driven by a growing number of private initiatives.
In all countries the world over, there has emerged a generosity as diverse as it is rich. Great philanthropists and small donors alike, more and more of our fellows are offering
their time and money to help preserve our common future. And these fraternal gestures towards future generations are also wonderfully efficient.
If we think only of the actions of a foundation like the one created by former US President Bill Clinton, which just announced a partnership with the City of Los Angeles to
install public lighting using light-emitting diodes or LEDs. Thanks to this bold program, it is possible to predict yearly savings of at least forty thousand metric tons of
carbon. I could give many more examples of such actions that, each on its own level, are reshaping the face of our world.
To this end, they can rely on the momentum, moral authority and the political impetus of large multilateral organizations, like UNESCO, whose Director General, Mr Matsuura, I
would like to thank from the bottom of my heart for his initiative in organizing our meeting today.
Through these convergent efforts and tenacity, through this meeting of shared ambitions, the global landscape has truly changed.
This buoyant context should incite us, each within our means and on our own level, to show our determination to push on further.
Moving further ahead now means broadening the spectrum of our concerns to include what may have seemed forgotten in mobilization for the environment: people.
We must put them back at the centre of the debate, never forgetting that the major issue has always been and will always be humankind. Indeed, the weakest always suffer most from damage to the environment. The wounds inflicted on the Earth are always the disasters inflicted on humankind.
There again, major progress has already been made and I am thinking in particular of Professor Jean Malaurie's basic work on the Inuit. Thanks to his research and that of so many others who followed in his footsteps, we are better informed of the true situation of those who live in the Arctic, the amplitude of the damage climate change implies for them, as well as the means for giving them concrete help.
The global change we are witnessing does not only produce direct effects that can be measured topographically or in biological studies.
There are also, less obvious but just as powerful, in-depth changes in social practices and mentalities. There are those countless silent revolutions that inexorably affect the balance and traditions peoples inherit from their long history. There is a need to preserve their way of life by adapting it to the changing world.
This is a daunting challenge for all these peoples, against which they are often helpless.
We must help them.
I am thinking, for example, of the training of new elites. In the Arctic as elsewhere, today they must be integrated into our globalized civilization's networks. The need for training in this case is very clear. This is a vital issue for Arctic peoples, an issue around which we can take action in coordination with them.
It would be illusory, of course, to believe that our social, cultural and educative action in favor of the Arctic can be limited to the populations living there.
We know that our horizon is now a global brotherhood. If the cars we drive here destroy Arctic ecosystems, if the melting of distant glaciers makes sea levels rise around us, then our commitment must be the same on all continents.
This is the true significance of today's meeting, at least as I see it: building sustainable development thanks to science, as well as collective action, action that is social, cultural and educational in our own countries, less directly concerned, but equally responsible.
It is a duty of reciprocity that must lead us to prevent the catastrophes predicted for the Arctic, in particular by providing support to local populations, while at the same time fighting the causes of these upheavals everywhere by creating a common destiny.
That, too, is something we can achieve, above all, through knowledge, widespread awareness, the widest possible dissemination of scientific work, as well as of our discussions today.
“While seeing and knowing were once major ethical issues [···], since the Age of Enlightenment, seeing and power have risen to become those of our 21st century”, writes Paul Virilio.
As we have seen, we know we can. Let us now share our views as widely as possible so we can accomplish great things.
Thank you. |
