Excellencies,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
On behalf of the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, allow me to warmly welcome you to this conference, entitled “Climate Change and the Green Economy.”
It is an exceptional honor for our think-tank to have the opportunity to work together with the SDSN, established by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in August 2012. Its Director is Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who is also a founding member of the CIRSD Board of Advisors.
Many people around the world have been influenced by Professor Sachs over the past decades. We deeply admire his incessant efforts and remarkable leadership in charting a global path to climate safety and sustainable development. I will always be profoundly grateful for his guidance and friendship, which began more than ten years ago at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Allow me to thank Singapore’s Ambassador Kwok Fook Seng, Chief Negotiator for Climate Change, and Mr. Kunihiko Shimada, Special Advisor to Japan’s Ministry of the Environment, for traveling all this way to share their views with us.
Allow me also to express my great appreciation to Serbia’s Minister of Agriculture and Environmental Protection, Mrs. Snežana Bogosavljević-Bošković, as well as to Albania’s Environment Minister Lefter Koka, Montenegro’s Minister of Sustainable Development Branimir Gvozdenović, and Kees Van der Ree, the ILO’s Coordinator of the Global Green Jobs Program. They will speak during our morning panel, which will address regional cooperation in the field.
I would like to extend my warmest greetings to the distinguished corporate leaders and entrepreneurs from Southeast Europe, the Middle East, and the United States who will participate in the afternoon panel. That session will focus on the role of the private sector in transitioning from the brown economy of today to the green economy of tomorrow.
Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank our two local partners, the Green Economy Center and the McCann Group.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
In May 2014, Southeast Europe was beset by a great tragedy—the worst floods in recorded history.
Dozens of lives were lost and entire villages wiped off the map. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to evacuate homes, farms, schools, hospitals, and businesses. Many of them lost all of their possessions as the waters receded.
The flooding caused billions of dollars in material damage, and endangered the region’s energy and transportation grids, as well as our food supply.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
All around the world, catastrophic disasters like the one we experienced have become increasingly commonplace.
These are but a few of the symptoms of the growing planetary emergency before us, as the recent Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made clear. It reaffirmed—in strong and unambiguous language—that humanity is the primary cause of global warming and climate change.
It also underscored that a business-as-usual approach will produce—I quote—“severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally.”
And it concluded that, if left unaddressed, the effects of climate change will pose a grave threat to our way of life in the decades to come—to every culture and country on Earth: the sustainability of our cities, the crops we grow, and the water we can drink. All these presuppose certain conditions in nature that are in grave danger of disappearing.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
This conference provides us with an opportunity to deliberate on how Southeast Europe can participate more fully in ongoing international negotiations on climate change, whist exploring how the region can take more advantage of the global transition to the green economy.
We meet a little more than a year before the critical 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—COP 21, as it’s called—is scheduled to take place in Paris.
Recent developments suggest that the world’s largest CO2 emitters are beginning to grasp the enormity of what must be done. A few months ago, the European Union decreed that it would cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent in the next 15 years. And just last week, China and the United States announced breakthrough commitments to achieve deep decarbonization by mid-century.
I think we may be cautiously optimistic that the world’s biggest economies will help lead the international community in achieving an ambitious legal agreement on climate change. This would constitute an important step in the struggle to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, cap global warming at 2 degrees Celsius, and build world-wide climate-resilience.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
A comprehensive agreement on climate change could serve as a catalyst for the global transformation to a low-carbon economy.
If the international community implements it in good faith, virtually everything we design and create, manufacture and consume, would fundamentally change—the way we power our lives, the way we build our cities, the way we retrofit our factories . . .
I believe the global paradigm shift to the green economy presents an unparalleled opportunity for less developed regions such as ours to take a generational leap forward.
We have the chance to overcome our recent social and economic failures, and build up our societies on a sustainable and prosperous foundation.
This will be possible, in my view, only if we choose to be an active participant in the negotiations, instead of being mere onlookers. We should engage more proactively in the COP and post-2015 agenda talks, and so put ourselves in a better position to protect and promote the particular interests of our region.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The complexity of the challenge represented by the transition to the green economy is, no doubt, truly vast—and solely relying on the immediate demands of the market is unlikely to be a recipe for success. Around the world, strategic economic decisions will increasingly fall within the purview of states, narrowing the conceptual gap between geopolitics and geo-economics.
I believe that in order to create a sustainable future for Southeast Europe, purposeful and complementary steps will need to be taken by both the public and private sectors.
Innovation in targeted directions will have to be decidedly encouraged, so as to unleash the ingenuity of the best and brightest scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs—and thus lay the basis for the production of green economy products and services that can propel the region forward.
This may very well be the greatest challenge of our generation.
At the end of the long journey ahead lies the prospect of a region transformed—Southeast Europe as a green economy leader, whose contributions to sustainable development are looked upon with pride by those to whom we shall have bequeathed the legacy we endeavor to build.
This is a tall order by any stretch of the imagination.
But it is the sort of strategic ambition that we should all rally around. For at the end of the day, striving to stand at the vanguard of concerted efforts to decarbonize the world is the only sustainable road to prosperity in the 21st century.
Thank you very much.
Photo gallery from the international conference Climate Change and the Green Economy can be viewed here.
