E3G

The Quest for Climate Justice

By John Ashton

“The Quest for Climate Justice: Equity, Diplomacy and the Climate Negotiations”. Presentation by John Ashton at a conference on ‘Managing the Future’, Royal Society of Arts, 24 February 2004.

I was a negotiator for the UK in the Kyoto climate talks, and an adviser on environmental matters in the Foreign Office. Now I am working for a while outside government on many of the same issues, in a sense as a refugee from diplomacy.

Diplomats and civil servants give advice within the limits of what is politically possible in their society. Those limits are set by the values and cultural assumptions that give that society its sense of itself. Climate change is one of many emerging problems - the problems of a globalising world - that cannot be successfully addressed within the realm of what is currently practicable. Instead we need to expand the envelope of available choices.

How to do that is not just a question of politics, economics or diplomacy. We also need to re-examine our sense of identity as individuals and societies, and our willingness to be accountable to others in the increasingly interdependent global community in which we now live. That, of course, straddles the frontier between the temporal and spiritual domains.  So we need more conversations of the kind we are having today.