“We are running out of time to save the world.” Mary Robinson.
Overnight, the world’s leaders met in New York for the 2014 UN Climate Change Summit, aiming to lay the foundations for a new legally binding climate agreement in 2015.
Although you may not be fully aware that this was going on, especially not since the threat of terror in Australia was raised to high and following news of an alleged plot to kidnap and murder a random person off the streets of Sydney last week.
Regardless of the terror threat, you may not have known much about it anyway as our Prime Minister is not attending the Summit. Despite leaders like US President Barack Obama being present, and despite Tony Abbott being in New York the very next day for talks on the IS threat, he has opted to send his foreign minister Julie Bishop to the Climate Change Summit instead.
Now, we can’t complain too much about Bishop being present and helping to increase the number of female voices offering their take on what a new agreement might look like. However, we should be concerned about just how low action against climate change is falling down the priority list.
Leaders at the Summit in New York are expected to discuss their commitment to addressing global climate change, including funding for developing nations affected. Should Abbott have attended, there wouldn’t have been much for Australia to discuss anyway.
One wonders where climate change, and the need for the world’s leaders to come to a productive agreement on what next, would sit on the priority list if we had more women in power and ultimately involved in the decision-making process.
Indeed, it’s something that’s already come up overnight, with UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy on Climate Change Mary Robinson noting that if we remove the barriers to women’s participation, we’d solve climate change faster.
One Australian woman giving her opinion on the issue of priorities is Labor MP Melissa Parke. She told Parliament earlier this week — after expressing much concern over Australia’s escalating role in Iraq — that she finds it “extraordinary” that the Prime Minister is not attending the climate change summit.
“In this year’s quadrennial defence review, the US defence department describes the threat of climate change as a very serious national security vulnerability,” she said.
“If the Prime Minister really wants Australians to insouciantly go about their business, he needs to re-examine his climate change policy—or lack thereof—which many Australians, as demonstrated in yesterday’s climate-action rallies, regard as regressive, ignorant, destructive and politically self-indulgent.”
Parke’s received death threats on Twitter due to her stance on questioning our involvement in Iraq, especially after calling for a formal parliamentary debate on just what we’re doing there earlier this month.
“A call for my execution may be extreme, but it demonstrates how the beating of the drums of war and the hysteria this generates inevitably prevent the kind of calm, serious and rational discussion that is called for when decisions are being made to commit Australians overseas to kill and potentially to be killed,” she said.
All that drum beating also sees other priorities fall well and truly down the actionable list. Should we continue to ignore the climate threat – and it’s notable that the world’s leaders are considering more options of adaption rather than prevention — our children, our grandchildren and their children will be the ultimate beneficiaries of a very different kind of terror.
Earlier this week, Robinson told the Irish Independent that she fears for what her five grandchildren will experience when they reach their 40s in 2050 – a world shared with nine billion others, with more droughts, cyclones and other “catastrophic climate shocks”.
“And what will they say about us? Because we had a chance to make the right decisions.”