Blog by Jane Davidson
I live in a refurbished barn where we grow most of our own food, run our well insulated house on our own wood, recycle, compost, and use renewable energy. I try to reduce my carbon footprint every year - yet nothing I do at home will change the systemic problems that face our generation. Although I firmly believe that the personal and the political should go hand in hand and that we should lead by example, my individual actions, even if multiplied a thousand or million times over, would not secure a better life for future generations.
So how do we make beneficial changes for people and the planet? Ultimately it comes from action, either by governments or people and preferably both. The politics of nudge - small incremental improvements year on year - are utterly insufficient for the challenges ahead. The earth is a single complex system; the global challenge is to maintain the optimal conditions for life. John Rawls, the American philosopher talks about inter-generational justice, where each generation should do unto future generations what they would have wanted past generations to do unto them.
We’ve tried the collective government route. Thousands of politician hours across the world have been spent in making global ‘commitments’ to tackle climate change and repair our damaged ecosystems, and still no one country has set or met the world’s climate or biodiversity conservation challenges. Instead of world leaders responding by strengthening commitments, the opposite has happened; in each area, previously binding commitments have been replaced by non-binding ‘strategic’ targets. The global conferences carry on – we have this year’s in Paris in December - yet so also do atmospheric emissions. Yet there has been no public outcry about the failure of government leaders to secure a safer longer term future for humanity. Business as usual and the systems that underpin it continue.
With every climatic and biodiversity indicator pointing in the wrong direction, the world stands as if paralysed. Nobody seriously believes that voluntary agreements will deliver, and yet that is the current trend. Collective action of the scale and pace needed requires legal underpinning. In 2012, the Earth Summit in Rio should have given the world a legal institutional framework for sustainable development and the green economy including appropriate monitoring and accountability in our common interest, and an international environmental court, but it failed to do either. Without legislation or regulation, there will be insufficient action.
When the newly devolved National Assembly for Wales came into being in 1999 it had a new and unique duty to promote sustainable development in the exercise of its functions. This was seen as an extremely innovative and exciting duty, representing a new kind of democracy. By 2009, with the publication of “One Wales One Planet,” the Government in Wales was clearer about the ‘the Wales we want’ which would have certain characteristics. It would
- live within its environmental limits
- have healthy, biologically diverse and productive ecosystems
- have a resilient and sustainable economy
- have communities which are safe, sustainable, and attractive
- be a fair, just and bilingual nation
My last political act prior to leaving Government in 2011 was to propose that the commitment to put sustainable development at the heart of government should be a key manifesto commitment. I’m delighted that this was accepted and in its manifesto for the last election, the Government party said it would,
“legislate to embed sustainable development as the central organising principle in all our actions across government and all public bodies, and to monitor that externally”
In January 2015, that commitment was delivered as “The Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act” passed into law. Legislation demonstrates commitment. Prior to my introducing the legislation on recycling which has seen Wales come from behind to outperform the rest of the UK, we had voluntary agreements and targets with the local authorities; prior to my introduction of our carrier bag charge, the retailers’ voluntary agreements couldn’t reduce bag use by 50%; the charge reduced it immediately by 90%, has brought much needed income to the voluntary sector and only this week a survey found 74% of people of Wales in support. Some things need legislation, because they are of wide public benefit but will not be achieved by individual action without a legal basis – smoking and seatbelt legislation come to mind.
If sustainability is our best defence, it needs to be championed by politicians and supported and protected by the law. When times are fiscally tough, public services retreat to the delivery of their statutory responsibilities. Making the future more resilient for people and planet seems to me to be at the heart of responsible government at all levels. The Wellbeing of Future Generations Act has created meaningful legal obligations, supported by monitoring and review mechanisms which impose significant consequences for failure. The Act now needs to be at the heart of the democratic process in Wales; the big vision of a sustainable future that helps the Government take decisions that are consistent with its principles. The Act comes into force in April 2016, a month before the Assembly elections. It will be interesting to see how all parties wrestle with their new obligations to look after the interests of future generations – after all, if governments won’t, who else will?