E3G

The Quest for Climate Justice

By John Ashton

The Red Command and the Third Command

A year ago, I was given a tour by a kindly Genovese priest of two neighbouring shanty towns, or favelas, in Rio. Morro do Borel and Chacara do Ceu jostle for space at the top of one of Rio’s many steep and beautiful, hills.

Morro is controlled by the city’s dominant band of drug traffickers, known as the Red Command. Chacara is the territory of their main rivals in the Third Command. The frontier between them is invisible. You only know when you cross it because you can feel it in the hairs on the back of your neck. Not surprisingly given the close proximity of the two communities and the tinderbox atmosphere enveloping both, the uneasy truce between the two gangs regularly breaks down. Nimble teenage gunfighters then take over the narrow alleys and blast away at each other like avatars in some apocalyptic computer game.

As anyone who has seen the film City of God will know, there is joy and spontaneity too in the favelas. People tend to live for the moment. But on the whole, there are better places to raise a family. 

And even if you are wealthy in Rio, it is getting harder to insulate yourself from the reality around you. Rio’s jet set lives, increasingly, in gated communities, behind high walls protected by growing numbers of heavily armed private guards. But this is an arms race they can never win. In London, we worry about a lone burglar with a knife. In Rio, the intruder who wakes you up at night is likely to come with 50 colleagues armed with rocket launchers.

What do Rio’s favelas tell us about the future we now have to manage? Well, they remind us that it is a world of enormous inequality. Of course, inequality is as old as society. But the gap between rich and poor has never been greater, and it continues by most measures to grow.

The favelas also offer a trailer for the kind of world we may wake up in if we fail to deal with that inequality. It’s a nightmare vision. Inequality if left unattended eventually becomes unsustainable. Order breaks down. However tight you build your protective ring of steel, there will always be people desperate enough to find a way through it. As the President of the World Bank and the British Chancellor of the Exchequer wrote last week, poverty demands action “not only because it is morally right but because it is now essential for stability and security”. Our TV screens now bring us daily examples of just how much damage can be done by a few well organised and very angry people.

In other words if we want to deliver stability and rising real incomes to 6 rising to 8 billion people, we will have to do it on an equitable basis. This too is not a new message.

In Europe in the 19th century, politicians came to realise that inattention to equity limited the ability to create wealth, and ultimately posed a threat to public order. Social equity investment gradually became central to all decent politics. This happened in response to forces that were similar, albeit on a smaller scale, to those now at work through globalisation, namely the earlier explosion in connectivity and interdependence brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

There is also a more subtle message from Brazil. Criminality is just one of the problems that the Lula government is grappling with. But this is not just a Brazilian problem. If it gets worse – as it continues to do in Rio – it will eventually threaten confidence in the Brazilian economy, which in turn will have harmful effects around the world.

Likewise, how can the drug barons afford their rocket launchers? They make money because young professionals in London and countless other cities have developed a recreational taste for cocaine. Those young professionals are, in a sense, accomplices in Rio’s descent into violence.

Everyone nowadays aspires to sustainable development. I’ll come back later to what that means. But Rio is telling us that our destinies are connected as never before. We therefore need to develop the reflexes of a single global community. We will only do that if we build into those reflexes - into the way we conduct diplomacy, design institutions, frame politics – a much stronger commitment to equity across the global community than we have so far achieved. When there are burdens or benefits to share, they must be shared fairly. When we see, even in a faraway land, suffering that it is in our power to alleviate, and when we see the opportunities that are enriching those equipped to grasp them denied to others, then our sense of our place in the international community must compel us to act.