UN mourns its parents

For the world’s symbol of multilateralism — the United Nations (UN) system — it is an occasion for mourning. The fifth session of the UN Environment Assembly was held at a time when unilateralism had almost taken over the multilateralism in fighting global crises. Starting from vaccine-nationalism to extreme protectionism for national trade and economy, every country seems to have bypassed the noble system of building a global nation.

The Assembly’s deliberations mostly revolved around the profound impacts of decline of multilateralism on the planet’s environment, a pressing global challenge that needs multilateral efforts to face it. António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, termed the situation a “triple environmental emergency” that takes into account climate disruption, biodiversity decline and pollution. He called for resetting our relationship with nature.

But the Assembly made the route out of these crises conditional to global joint efforts and commitments. “Governments and people need to understand in their very DNA that all environmental, social and economic challenges are interlinked. And they must be tackled together”, he said.

But in global governance, multilateralism could embed itself to countries’ DNA, a sort of genetic modification the UN chief wished. Earlier in its outlook for 2020, the UN warned “a weakening commitment to multilateralism — whether in the economic or political arena — the capacity of the international community to contain and resolve conflict has decreased”.

The UN marked its 75^th anniversary recently. There were talks about its relevance but mostly the celebration turned into a serious note-taking affair on countries not feeling a need for a multilateral approach.

The Assembly articulated a new term: ‘Environmental multilateralism’. There is an immediate context to this articulation when the UN itself has reconciled to the decline of multilateralism. It is the scale of the environmental crisis caused by human consumption and related natural resources extractions.

The UN Environment Programme has estimated that in the past half-a-century we have exploited resources at much faster than our population growth. Global human population doubled in this period while extraction of natural resources tripled; the economy has increased by fivefold. At the same time, over 820 million people suffer from hunger while 70 per cent of the world population suffered increasing inequality — before the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19 pandemic struck.

This makes the global situation a polarised one, supercharged with inequality of consumption and benefits among the rich and poor countries. The rich countries — that championed multilateralism and even stepped in to participate in miniscule wealth sharing with developing countries — are now increasingly adopting protectionism in trade and development support. But the developing and poor countries are the ones who want a multilateral and globalised world that not only support them but also offer that benefits of a global market.

In this polarisation situation, the collapse of the natural world added a twist. The world’s poor and the rich depend on natural resources. But for the rich it is a raw material to a prosperous life while for the poor it is a survival resource. The faster the environmental degradation, the deeper is the poverty level for the poor countries. Saving the environment, however, needs more efforts in terms of resetting the rich countries’ consumption and economic exploitation of it.

On the other hand, the poor need more control and monetisation of the natural resources for their escape out of the poverty trap. This needs a globalised re-commitment to strike that proverbial balanced distribution of wealth, and also engineering equality in existential norms.

Environmental multilateralism is thus a specific need of the hours, irrespective of whether the world has abandoned this as a governance principle.

international relations Environment World