The human race faces no more serious challenge than saving the Earth from destruction, which becomes more likely every day that we fail to insist on sustainable development. The rapid rate of human growth and the destruction of our energy sources with no ability to replace them have created a dangerous one-way path to oblivion.
This is why the 21st meeting in Paris of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is so important. The negotiations starting next week will bring together more than 190 countries to try and write a new global climate change agreement.
The Paris summit is part of a long series of climate conferences stretching back through Copenhagen and Kyoto to Rio and further back. None of these conferences have succeeded in getting complete buy-in, but they have succeeded in creating a valuable sense of the crucial importance of sustainability.
The UAE has helped lead the way by devoting a substantial part of its oil revenues to research and support for renewable energies. Abu Dhabi hosts both the world-leading research centre at Masdar, and the headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena). It also runs the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week (ADSW), which is the world’s largest annual gathering on clean energy, water and sustainability, as explained on these pages earlier this week by Dr Sultan Ahmad Al Jaber, the UAE’s Minister of State and Special Envoy for Energy and Climate Change.
A robust agreement in Paris, that wins widespread support, will not be an end in itself. The Paris meeting is part of an ongoing process that must be flexible enough to create a continual process of nurturing sustainability in countries that have a plentiful supply of energy, as well as those that are still building coal-fired power plants in order to have a reliable supply of energy in the first place. The Paris agreement needs to be inclusive across all of humanity so that we can all move in the right direction.
