How we can change the world in 2015
International policies are notorious for being abstract. They seem to crystalise in lofty international summits and we remain confounded as to why we should care. At last though better sense has prevailed on the powers that be. Next year, three major international policies on climate change, disasters and sustainable development will come into force. A departure from familiar opacity, each of these policies has built-in mechanisms to solicit the views of the ordinary citizen. The process is certainly worth engaging with. You may not end up pitching in, but you'll definitely emerge enlightened. And there are a number of reasons why that's a good thing, too.
The post-2015 agreement on sustainable development goals (SDG) will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to which 189 governments had committed in 2000. Not all these goals have been realised but they have contributed to guiding policies that have resulted in staggering improvements in different areas. For instance, the number of children who died before celebrating their fifth birthday is down from 75 in 2,000 to 48 in 2012 for every 1,000 children born. The number of mothers perishing while giving birth to these children is down from 330 to 210 for every 100,000 births, in the same period. While discussions on what exactly the SDGs will encapsulate are ongoing, they are likely to be far more ambitious in scope than the MDGs, as they will aim for transformational improvements in infrastructure, urban development and economic growth - issues that will affect all of us, regardless of where we live and what we do.
The climate change agreement that will come into effect in 2015 (in Paris) will aim to tackle the causes and impacts of this global problem. Far from being a distant issue about melting glaciers and drowning polar bears, climate change is likely to slash 8.7 per cent from India's GDP by the end of the century (for perspective, India's current defence spending is 2.4 per cent of GDP). Some experts also argue that climate change contributed to an increase in wheat prices that lit the spark that became the Arab Spring. Also, the World Health Organisation claims that the health impacts of climate change have caused over 140,000 excess deaths annually (as compared to 110,000 that died in Iraq as a result of conflict in the first decade of the 21st century). The new Paris agreement aims to develop mechanisms of dealing with these impacts and determine the amount of greenhouse gasses (which cause global warming) that each country will be allowed to pump into the atmosphere.
The disasters agreement that will be forged next March in Sendai, Japan replaces an existing agreement that was put in place in 2005. Known as the Hyogo Framework for Action, this existing global disasters policy has led to governments paying more attention to reducing risk from disasters (for example, many countries established a National Disaster Management Authority after signing the agreement). Countries now understand the risk posed to life and property by disasters much better. A good example of this is the production of the landmark Vulnerability Atlas of India that allows you to see if your neighbourhood is vulnerable to earthquakes, cyclones and floods and permits the authorities to take appropriate action. Another key achievement of the existing disasters framework is that most countries around the world now have a policy in place to deal with disasters. While many claim that the framework has had partial success, others argue that it has contributed to a steady decline in the risk of us dying as a result of natural disasters (for example, those living in East Asia and the Pacific are now twice as safe from the risk of death from tropical cyclones as they were in 1980). The new policy is likely to build on these achievements and push countries harder to ensure that losses and mortality from disasters are further reduced.
Interestingly, each of these three major global deals has built-in mechanisms to solicit your views. The website myworld2015.org established by the UN allows all of us to determine what the new set of sustainable development goals should be. This simple web-based system presents you with 16 areas which the future set of goals might tackle and asks you to prioritise six. The climate agreement, too, is open for discussion through a number of forums, one example is the World Wide Views on Climate and Energy initiative that will solicit comments from citizens in a hundred countries ahead of negotiations in Paris. Signing up to this unique initiative through its website will allow citizens to reflect on key questions on climate change. The results will be collated in real time via a web tool and a few weeks later, fed into the discussions to forge a global climate agreement in Paris. Similarly, a series of online dialogues hosted by the UN on preventionweb.com allows anyone to periodically contribute their views to moderated discussions on different aspects of the disasters agreement.
Activists have for long clamoured for greater democracy in international policy making processes through such interactivity between policy-makers and citizens. Now that the systems are in place, let's not lose out on the opportunity toinfluence these processes that will shape the future of the world.