GLOBAL VISION : THE RIO + 10 INTERVIEWS :



		The Rio + 10 interviews David Woolcombe Youth action for sustainable development David Woolcombe is a member of the Global Vision adviser group, and the President of Peace Child International, a youth-led NGO involving more than 1,500 groups of teenagers in over 180 countries, who take responsibility for peace, human rights and the environment through education, leadership development and direct participation in the events that shape our world. Peace Child co-ordinates hundreds of sustainable development action projects, and produces world-class educational textbooks written by young people, including Rescue Mission: Planet Earth which sold 500,000 copies in 23 languages.

Peace Child also produces the series of World Youth Congresses and European Youth Congresses, including the Fifth World Youth Congress in Istanbul, Turkey, from 31 July to 13 August 2010. Michael O'Callaghan shot this video interview at the U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development, in Johannesburg, in 2002. © 2002 Global Vision - all rights reserved. This video is not available online. Full transcript (2,122 words, slightly edited for clarity): What's your view of the progress or lack of progress since the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro? My view of progress since Rio is that when chapter 25, of Agenda 21 was written about youth and children's participation, it was actually done by Susan Tugood who was well over 40 at the time. But in the run-up to Johannesburg, young people have been very much in evidence and have been doing all their own statements and agreements as to what should go in. And I think just witnessing them, the young delegates taking part and the energy at the round table thing, they were almost dictating the debate because they were so forceful! And I think that new maturity of youth participation is what I detect as the biggest difference between now and Rio, and I welcome that and I think Peace Child has been part of that development, so that's all very good. What other developments? I think the consciousness is a lot stronger now that something needs to be done. But I would say that an awful lot of what needs to be done is going to have to done in spite of governments, not because of them, and that's really regrettable, you know! There are things like the European Bet which bet the European Union that young people could reduce carbon emissions more than governments, and that came off. And Sustain USA is doing the same thing for the Americas. So I think civil society has really got the message and are running with it, and at some point governments are going to have to catch up! Were you disappointed by the outcomes of this Johannesburg summit? Inevitably! I think Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are exactly right, there has been some regression since the Rio commitments. But I prefer to see that as realism creeping in, and I think some of the aspirations at Rio were probably fairly unrealistic. What really really disappoints me is that they missed the renewable energy target. That that was low-hanging fruit, we could have got that one! And that would really have advanced the argument for more investment and subsidies of renewable energy. But just look at the massive massive armoury and corporate money available for promotion of the fossil fuel lobby! I mean, the whole thing... The other thing that I really regret is there should have been much much stronger targets set for sustainable consumption patterns and production methods. And I think there is very weak language all over the document. But I tell you, the thing that I do think is the backbone of the Johannesburg commitment - and will remain so and what is really encouraging - is the commitment to the Millennium Global Goals. They are amazingly ambitious targets. And the World Bank, UNDP, every sector of the UN system, every European Union country, even the US, is coming forward and saying these are achievable targets and we're going to do our damnedest to achieve them! And as Ronnie what's his name, the forestry minister says, come 2015 guys expect the biggest global celebration ever because we're going to meet those targets! And I think that that's the sign of hope, because we're all focused now on halving the number of people in poverty, two-thirds reduction in internal debt, arresting and reversing the spread of AIDS, universal primary education for all, gender equality. You know, these are very ambitious targets given where we were 15 years ago now, and Peace Child is absolutely committed to mobilising young people to recognise that this is the task in hand and it's the greatest challenge of our generation to achieve those targets, so that's where we're going. What is Peace Child's focus at the moment, and can you tell us about Morocco? Sure: Peace Child's focus is a programme called Be The Change! and this is a progress report that we brought to Johannesburg. And it lists about 50 projects that are underway and funded, led by young people. And as you know at the Hawaii Millennium Young People's Congress that we organised, young people said, you know, "enough already, education is good but we want to go out there and take action!" And that's where the Be The Change! programme was born. So: youth action for sustainable development is where Peace Child is moving, and a lot of other organisations are doing similar sorts of things. And what we want to do is to bring that evidence - that young people have a serious and constructive contribution to make in the achievement of the Johannesburg commitment and the Millennium Development Goals. And the King of Morocco and the Government of Morocco are hosting this conference in August of 2003 to review where we've gotten to, and have a big exhibition of the kinds of projects that young people are doing. Obviously they can't build damns or do major infrastructure projects, but small community improvements they can do, and do it at a hell of a much lower price than the big professional development agencies. So I hope that Morocco will really really get the youth contribution on the radar of the big development agencies, so that we can mobilise that 50% of the world's population that is under 25 to be a major major actor in the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, and that's what Morocco is all about. Great! Any other message to the planet? We're actually trying to make a movie of Peace Child - the story, you know, of how children bring peace to the world and solve all the world's problems - the Peace Child 2002 script. But we're looking to set it in Kashmir so that it becomes, you know, that's the focus, because I was certainly very scared by the way the tensions were rising in that part of the world. It's a huge problem and it's been festering for over 50 years now. And I think it's time that we lanced that one, and the Peace Child movie should do it - and hopefully raise an awful lot of money for Be The Change! projects, that's how we hope to go. Sounds like fun! A documentary? No, no! A story? Yeah: Bollywood - Hollywood - UK co-production. Bombay dreams, Peace Child dreams! Sounds great! And do you have a script? The script will be developed by the kids, as usual. And what else? I think the human rights education programme is immensely important. And the programme that Rosey [Rosey Simonds is David's wife] just finished on student-teacher partnerships for human rights education - a real partnership between teachers and students to figure out best ways of communicating and educating young people about human rights - that was very useful. We did it around the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and I think it was very successful in most of the 14 countries in which we did it. And we'd love to be able to do a similar educational programme for the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is the most endorsed document, and I think is the foundation of where young people's participation has come from. And the other thing which is fun to mention is that we finally got some money from the British government to go out and explain sustainable development to the schools in the UK. So we've got quite an entertaining PowerPoint presentation and a live action presentation about sustainable development - and obviously the outcomes of Johannesburg - which we will be putting out to about two, three hundred schools in the course of the next year. So that's a massive effort actually, and Rosey and Russell and a lot of the new interns at Buntingford [where Peace Child's headquarters is located in England] will be taking that on. And you should come see it, it's going to be a good show! Do you think we're going to be able to save the planet before it is too late? Everyone is wondering, you know... I was talking to Mark Halle from the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, and he says we have to be realistic, at this point, we have to start thinking that we might not succeed, we may have to cope with mitigation strategies to deal with climate change and so on. The Human Development Report book that we brought out this year is very bleak about the prospects of achieving the Millennium Development Goals. You know, if you look at the way the graphs are moving, they are not even close, we've got to make enormous changes to get there! But I think the interesting question - for me it's a question that I've reflected on a lot - is the difference between sustainability and sustainable development. Because sustainability is a scientific equation between the amount of natural resources we have and human exploitation of them. Sustainable development is a socio-economic idea which is politically driven, which has absolutely no basis in science at all. It's like the 16th century alchemists' goal, it's a fiction, it's a fantasy. You know, geese do not lay golden eggs! It sounds too good to be true and it probably is. Jeremy Seabroook wrote this article in the Guardian saying just that, you cannot have it all, you cannot grow the planet so that everyone can live like an American, that would take another 10 to 15 planets to do! And you can't sustain the way we are because, everyone who's come to Johannesburg has said you've got to eradicate poverty and clearly there has to be development. So you're pushing against a door that isn't going to open. And I think that that's the reality that hasn't been faced with sufficient intellectual rigour anywhere on the planet. The only developments, the the first faltering steps down that path are things like Factor Four [see our inteview with Dr. Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker] and low energy light bulbs and cars that to go for 200 miles to the litre. That kind of thing is the way we need to be going. But instead, the science department is looking at national missile defence systems and so on. Every ounce of brilliance and genius on the planet has to be focused on that problem: how do we live in the comforts that we've come to enjoy in Western Europe and North America without destroying the resource base that currently provides those comforts? That is the enormous challenge! I think there probably are ways of doing it. The idea of life after death drove the European Renaissance, you know, but it's probably a fiction. Sustainable development is probably a fiction, but still it is the defining aspiration that we have as a planet today, and I think that it can be the new opiate of the masses. We're all pushing for that, and I think, that's why it's so desperately important that everybody understands what the concept is about and that it really really is explored with intellectual rigour. And we haven't seen a whole lot of that here at Johannesburg. There's been an awful lot of flap and weak and weary sort of intellectual thinking; it's laborious stuff, and we've got to get beyond that and there are people who can think about this kind of stuff and it needs to be done much more seriously. So I've just said that the whole last two weeks has been a complete waste of time! You also said sustainable development should be the opium of the masses. Do you really mean that? As an aspiration it should be, yeah. The opium of the masses is a terrible metaphor! To narcotise the public with some fantasy? Surely we want to inspire them. OK, so opium is probably the wrong thing because that relaxes them. What you need is to stimulate them! If you feel that actually the challenge of your life is to live in a sustainable way, to ensure that resources are left for your children and grandchildren, if that becomes a defining characteristic of your aspiration as a human being, then I think you're in a much better place to proceed towards some sort of lasting way of having a planetary family of 10 billion plus people live in some degree of comfort with clean water and habitation and health care and so on, on a small planet. Because I was told by one guy here who's in the space business that it's going to be another 100 years before we can planetform Mars! And you know, they're right, it's a bloody big challenge, because we're going to be up to 10 billion people before we can actually deal with 6!