After the global crisis following the Covid-19 pandemic, sustainable development issues seem to have disappeared from most political agendas and media homepages in the West.
During the forum ‘Is the ecological transition still on the agenda?’, economist Gaël Giraud of Georgetown University in Washington explained this lack of interest by pointing out a decisive factor: at the end of 2022, most reinsurers (the companies that insurers use to insure themselves) refuse to cover insurers against damage caused by extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and hurricanes, just when these events are set to increase in number and severity due to global warming. ‘So two things can happen,’ Giraud explained, ‘Either the state intervenes as an insurer of last resort, or it renounces to save its citizens from the next disaster, similar to the floods that are devastating Eastern Europe right now. The difficulty, of course, is that the public finances of many states seem too fragile to be able to afford losses of several tens of billions every time a hurricane or drought hits their territory.
But the real issue is the connection between ecology and war: ‘Geopolitical tensions,’ Giraud went on to explain, ‘have convinced some asset managers that the urgent need now is to finance the defence sector, especially in the United States, where the arms industry is working flat out to fuel the Ukrainian resistance.
Moreover, war is also an obstacle to the ecological transition ‘because it pushes countries towards energy sovereignty and coal is the most sovereign energy,’ explained Aurélien Hamelle, General Manager of Strategy and Sustainability at Total Energies. ‘And the other obstacle is within countries,’ Hamelle continued, ‘because the debate on these issues is extremely polarised and taken hostage by politics. But this is a problem: these should be bipartisan issues.’
The representatives of the religious faiths proposed spiritual reflection as an antidote to the ‘selfishness of individuals and nations’ that hinders progress in the ecological transition: ‘Christian theology,’ explained Bishop Kristina Kühnbaum-Schmidt, President of the National Committee of the Lutheran World Federation in Germany, ‘in the past described man as the master of creation, but this vision has changed and an ecological mentality and “ecotheology” has developed’. And Moriyasu Ito, an exponent of Meiji Jingu Shintoism, proposed the ancient Shinto wisdom as an example of a balanced and grateful relationship with nature: ‘We are living in a time when it is necessary not only to implement important social measures and regulations,’ he explained, ‘but also to make changes in our individual ways of thinking on a global scale.
