2015: the Most Crucial Year for Decades in the Climate Battle - by Geoffrey Lean

This year, one of Britain’s leading green businessmen told me this week, “is going to be the most important year in the history of the world!”  That may be pushing it a bit, but it will certainly be the most crucial for the environment in nearly a quarter of a century.  In particular, it needs to be the one in which the green movement – now in its fifties – finally comes of age and concentrates on what it is for, rather than what it is against.

Two developments in particular – one well publicised, the other not – should force environmentalists, and the rest of us, to focus on developing solutions rather than grinding on about problems.

The well-known one is the attempt, at December’s Paris summit, to reach a new agreement on climate change, billed as the world’s last chance to avert dangerous global warming.
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The second development in what promises to be the most decisive year for the planet since 1992, with its Rio Earth Summit, will be the worldwide adoption of the mind-numbingly titled Sustainable Development Goals at the UN General Assembly in New York in September, as a universal template for development up to 2030.  It would be easy to dismiss the 17 proposed goals (and the 169 more detailed “targets” with them) as yet another aspirational, loftily worded but unattainable UN wishlist – were it not for the astonishing success of their predecessors.

When the Millennium Development Goals were similarly adopted 15 years ago, few would ever have imagined that the world would manage to meet the target of halving the proportion of people in dire poverty by 2015.  But it did, and five years early.  Governments also succeeded, again by 2010, in halving the proportion of people without safe drinking water, and have made remarkable progress on other fronts: slashing hunger and child mortality, educating both girls and boys, and beating back diseases like malaria and TB.

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