Inside Geneva
Inside Geneva is a podcast about global politics, humanitarian issues, and international aid, hosted by journalist Imogen Foulkes. It is produced by SWI swissinfo.ch, a multilingual international public service media company from Switzerland.
Inside Geneva
Inside Geneva: pandemics and climate change, can multilateralism still work?
The world just agreed a pandemic treaty. But without the United States. Is it really a milestone?
‘‘It is a major step forward. I mean, just imagine if we failed. We would not only go back to the point before the pandemic, before COVID-19 struck us, we'd go back to a point much further back,” said Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein from the International Peace Institute.
But what about the global challenge of climate change?
“We're up against a ticking clock. And even though we've enjoyed successes in the past, even though the renewables rollout is going rather well, it's all too little, too late from the point of view of avoiding genuinely dangerous degrees of warming,” says climate security expert Peter Schwartzstein.
Why can’t world leaders really unite around global challenges?
‘Their children and grandchildren have to deal with abominable and extreme heat levels and forest fires and fierce hurricanes and no trade and collapsed economies and extreme food security and complete anarchy. Is this what they wish for their children. What form of love is that?” continues al Hussein.
Join host Imogen Foulkes on Inside Geneva for in-depth analysis of where we stand.
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Host: Imogen Foulkes
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This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, imogen Foulkes, and this is a production from Swissinfo, the international public media company of Switzerland. In today's programme… I see no objection. The resolution is adopted. Member countries of the World Health Organization have finalized an agreement on how to tackle future pandemics.
Speaker 1:It is a major step forward. I mean, just imagine if we failed we would not only go back to the point before the pandemic, before COVID-19 struck us, we'd go back to a point much further back. The next pandemic could be from a point that we don't have technology and the means to arrest it.
Speaker 3:President Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders designed to cut back on US environmental protection. We're up against a ticking clock and, even though we've enjoyed successes in the past, even though the renewables rollout is going rather well, it's all too little, too late from the point of view of avoiding genuinely dangerous degrees of warming view of avoiding, like, genuinely dangerous degrees of warming. So I mean we need significantly greater levels of ambition than we were seeing even before Trump's re-election in November.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva. In today's programme we've got two fascinating interviews for you, both of them reflecting the global crossroads we seem to be at. In the first we talked to former UN Human Rights Commissioner Zayd Rad Al-Hussein, who reflects on the challenges to multilateralism as the US pulls out of the Paris Climate Accord, but also some successes the new pandemic treaty agreed just a few days ago at the World Health Assembly. Is the treaty a triumph for global cooperation at a time when so many populist leaders are telling us that sovereignty is all important?
Speaker 1:You need to give up sovereignty if you're going to have a system that works. We give power to a referee when we're playing football because without the referee it becomes like football when we were six or seven we're all charging into each other and kicking each other in the shins and so forth, and so we decide to have a referee and we give them the power to blow the whistle, to adjudicate and award the points and give the penalties out.
Speaker 2:That's what we need to do in the international system, and then later in the programme we talked to environmental journalist Pete Schwarzstein, who specialises in climate insecurity. He's the author of the book the Heat and the Fury on the Frontlines of Climate Violence.
Speaker 3:The best characterisation of climate change's contribution to violence globally is it's basically applying tremendous pressure to whatever place or society's existing weaknesses are, and that's a big, big problem globally because we have so many fissures that can be exploited from inequality to misinformation, to corruption, to state brutality.
Speaker 2:That's to come. But first let's hear from Zaid Radal-Hussein. Since finishing his term as UN Human Rights Commissioner, he has remained active in international affairs. He's professor of the practice of law and human rights at the University of Pennsylvania. He's the founder of the International Peace Institute and he's a member of the Elders, the body founded by the late Nelson Mandela to bring together global leaders to work for peace, justice, human rights and a sustainable planet. Part of his work has included behind-the-scenes diplomacy, trying to bridge differences in the negotiations over that pandemic treaty. Because, although everyone agrees we don't want to be unprepared for another pandemic, we don't agree exactly how the treaty did unite countries around the need for global cooperation. But a key element still has to be ironed out on pathogen access and benefit sharing. In other words, what countries can expect to get vaccines and treatments, for example, in return for sharing data on any new viruses emerging in their territory?
Speaker 1:So when I talked to Zaid, I began by asking him whether the treaty really was meaningful. It is a major step forward. I mean, just imagine if we failed, if this treaty was defeated at the World Health Assembly and didn't garner the requisite votes. I think there's a strong point of view and I support it. I think there's a strong point of view, and I support it, that we would not only go back to the point before COVID-19 struck us. We'd go back to a point much further back.
Speaker 1:The next pandemic and if you recall that 70% of the diseases we experience come from animals the next pandemic could be from a point that we don't have technology and the means to arrest it and let's say, for the sake of argument, it killed slowly but surely. You know, we have no defenses, and so the argument that somehow this is, you know, it's immaterial, or whether we had it or not, is, I think, very false. Also, what it does, which is really intriguing, is that it's really the leading edge of the wedge in terms of the data revolution, because what we noticed in the negotiations is a very strong pushback, principally by the African countries, on this idea that they would make available their sequence data. They would sequence, a mutation of, as they did with the Omicron variant of COVID, and they upload the genetic sequence data. And for this efficient and rapid action they received precious little in the way of therapeutics, diagnostics and vaccines, and they were like wait a minute, wait a minute. We did our job and what do we get in return in terms of vaccines?
Speaker 1:And so what they've done now is they've said we're not going down that road again. If we're going to make data available, we're not going down that road again. If we're going to make data available, it's going to cost you, and I think what's going to happen and what we see emerging from this pandemic negotiation is that many people in the global south will say no longer. We are not going to make this data free. If you in the high income countries want to use our data, monetize it and profit from it, we want something in return. And what this negotiation has shown is that the global south is fed up, and the next phase in the negotiation is precisely this issue is how to work out the details of the mechanism such that, when sequence data is made available, that there is something in the form of a return.
Speaker 2:So you have been kind of involved in the behind the scenes diplomacy, talking to different member states about how it's important to have this treaty, and they bring their wishes to the table and so on. Give us a glimpse behind the scenes. How difficult has it been?
Speaker 1:Yes, we hosted, I think, about nine retreats.
Speaker 1:We always had a partner in the form of a member state, but we brought most of the key negotiators to a site on the other side of Lake Geneva and, as one of the negotiators said, we provided them with a sort of therapy, because hitherto there was no organization that would take the negotiators out of the negotiating space and then work through what the problems were, why they were unable to actually negotiate.
Speaker 1:The first several rounds there were no negotiations. It was a so-called input-driven exercise where they just repeat their statements and then the Bureau, the sort of number of countries, would determine what goes into the next iteration, next draft. And it's very unusual because this way the way in which health negotiations operated is very different from the way many other treaty negotiations work, and it was sort of to someone versed in the traditional method this was a very unusual bird, put it this way, but toward the end we managed, I think through the retreats we hosted, to identify a number of bridge builders and we were able to bring the African group Group 4 Equity with the high income countries.
Speaker 2:As you said, there's this key thing about pathogen sharing still to be agreed. How difficult is it going to be to get that final key step?
Speaker 1:Now it won't have any meaning until this final part, the pathogen access and benefit sharing, is agreed to, and then that altogether, one may make the argument that the treaty altogether may remain as fairly, we will only open up our market space to pharmaceuticals that buy into the system, then the market strengthens the treaty, right, because then the pharmaceuticals will have a decision to make. Africa is a continent of 1.3 billion people, right. And if the African countries were to say no, no, no, no, we will only open ourselves to pharmaceuticals that are in the system, then suddenly you have an extremely strong, strong treaty, a very strong treaty in place, and that is the importance of this thing.
Speaker 2:One of the things I think that does worry some people. One it's good, this treaty, but the United States is not there. It has left the World Health Organization. Can a global health treaty work without the United States?
Speaker 1:So I don't know whether it's that important at this current stage. I think what is important is that we have a treaty that's been adopted by the World Health Assembly and now we move to the next phase. It also, I think, is important in that it sort of restates the importance of science and medical science. You know, there's this total bizarre thing that you see, whether it's anti-vaxxers, all of whom believe that they're medical experts, it's anti-vaxxers, all of whom believe that they're medical experts, you have anti-vaxxers or those who are denying climate science, and yet, at an individual basis, if any of them fall ill, where do they go to? They go to a clinic, they go get tested. If they suspect they may have cancer, they would willingly submit to chemotherapy if that was the prescribed sort of action. So it's a mad world we live in now. It's sort of completely insane. Everything is tribalized and everything becomes sort of polemic and becomes really silly because the threats we face are so grave and so enormous and it's almost childish and puerile what you see happening.
Speaker 2:It's my heartening to see you almost laugh about it, but I do hear people, certainly in Europe and in the global south, very worried about what appears to be this other huge multilateral challenge which we can only solve multilaterally is climate change. You mentioned it there climate change deniers. We see almost an abandonment of climate work to try and keep, say, global warming under control. I mean certainly the United States has now completely abandoned it and some European countries are also saying they talk about in fixed cost terms. We can't afford it right now. How do you see that? How could this momentum which we had a bit of for a while, how do you think that could be restored?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was listening to Johan Rockström speak a few days ago and he said yes, of course we're now overshoot. So we're heading towards a 3.1 degree increase from pre-industrial levels in terms of global warming and it's very, very dangerous and we'll have five years now remaining in which we need to bring this under control. Otherwise we hit the tipping points and then we tumble into the abyss, and of course I mean it's extremely serious. You hope that there are enough cities, there are enough companies that actually do worry about the future and are not so short-sighted to believe that they will. The CEOs of these companies or the mayors of these towns will step safely into their graves and just won't care whether their children and grandchildren have to deal with abominable and extreme heat levels and forest fires and fierce hurricanes and no trade and collapsed economies and extreme food security and complete anarchy.
Speaker 1:I mean, if that's what they wish for their children, what form of love is that in future generations, right? So it shows, I suppose, the extreme selfishness that we still are possessed by, and it needs a deeper way of thinking. You know people who say, well, unless you experience it, unless you live in a coastal resort, and it sort of goes under the waves and the oceans. Basically, you know, you're not motivated by it, because you have daily preoccupations you have to pay your bills, you have to pay your mortgage or rent, you have to send your children to school, and that is all well, well accepted. But you know, all of us know, for instance, that you don't have to have suffered from an air crash to know you don't want to be in one. Your imagination is powerful enough to know that if you were to be in a plane that's falling out of the sky, it's horrible enough and you'd do everything to prevent that from happening. Well, the planet is travelling through space and it's going to crash soon.
Speaker 2:It sounds like you've kind of given up a bit on the political class then, but of course it is political leaders who represent member states at the United Nations. So where does that leave multilateralism, if you think that that class can't get together and solve?
Speaker 1:If you look at the UN Charter, nowhere is there consensus written into it. There's Article 18, which says every country has a right to vote, and you vote on everything. And that's what you do, and that's how you actually get to a strong consensus, because countries in the minority who are trying to block, block, block, block, block on behalf of commercial interests, banks or whoever they may be, would just be outvoted. You need to give up sovereignty in many of these respects if you're going to have a system that works. We give power to a referee when we're playing football, because without the referee, it becomes like football when we were six or seven we're all charging into each other and kicking each other in the shins and so forth. And so we decide to have a referee and we give them the power to blow the whistle, to adjudicate and award the points and give the penalties out. That's what we need to do in the international system, and how silly can we be otherwise? And that's what we've decided to do.
Speaker 1:We've decided now to strip or not. We but those acting on populist tendencies have decided to strip normative system that we have in place, but also the idea that we solve problems collectively and, if you want to each member state were to go on its own. Well, thank you very much. Anarchy is the next stop on our journey, so the epitaph will start to etch it, humanity's epitaph will start to word it, and I'm sure it's going to be something like you know, here lies humanity, but the markets were up, something ridiculous like that. It was all about the markets, the long-term viability of us as a species and living together with other species, and this fragile biosphere becomes secondary. I mean, it's rather amazing to me.
Speaker 2:Zaid Rad Al-Hussein there lamenting what he called the stripping away of our systems of international cooperation, or global refereeing, as he so nicely put it. We did learn during the Covid-19 pandemic that global cooperation is vital. Viruses don't recognise borders. The pandemic treaty, modest though it is so far, is a sign, perhaps, that we have learnt a few lessons. But what about climate change? That knows no borders either. Our entire planet is warming and yet the United States appears to be abandoning the work to tackle climate change and even removing all references to it from government documents. What does that mean when a world superpower actively denies what the vast majority of scientists see as a huge threat to our planet, even to our existence? I talked to Pete Schwartzstein. He's an environmental journalist, an independent climate security consultant and author of the Heat and the Fury on the Frontlines of Climate Violence.
Speaker 3:I think for those of us in the climate space, as with those in so many other fields, the past few months have been one of continual, mostly very unhappy whiplash In the climate space. The Trump administration is going out of its way to kill both climate language but also anything even tangentially related to climate programming, and this, of course, is sort of bleeding into all sorts of kind of very wide ranging and not always easy to sort of anticipate changes. I mean, even many NGOs humanitarian aid, development organizations that are kind of tangentially or at least partly dependent on whatever US funding is left are carefully scrubbing mentions of climate from their websites, carefully scrubbing mentions of climate from their websites. So there's a real sort of culture of fear and I don't think that's sort of too grand and too devastating a way of putting it. That's sort of taken hold of even agencies and even people that are not kind of explicitly under the thumb of Trump and his people.
Speaker 2:Some people here in Europe, perhaps clinging to some vestiges of optimism, have been trying to tell me that look, yeah, this is not good, but actually we are making good progress towards net zero, or at least reducing greenhouse gases. Is that optimism valid? Can other parts of the world keep going, even if the supposed world's greatest superpower abandons ship?
Speaker 3:It's certainly true that emissions are not increasing at the same speed that they previously were, and that's a success that's not to be sniffed at. I mean, people forget that until the Paris Climate Agreement we were on track for five or six Celsius worth of warming, as opposed to the roughly three Celsius of warming that we're on track for thus far Now. It's hard on a certain level to construe that as success when even at three Celsius of warming is devastating in the extreme and will kind of likely change almost every part of the planet in ways that sort of locals struggle to imagine. But nevertheless the fact that we have enjoyed significantly better outcomes than we were on track for not that long ago is sort of fodder for relative optimism. Equally and I mean within the US, if you move kind of beyond the federal government, at a state level, at a city level, there's still a lot going on. So it's possible that even within the kind of big, outsized beast that is the US, that it might not end up being quite as irresistibly bleak a story as it sort of currently looks from a DC perspective.
Speaker 3:But and this is I guess the salient point we're up against a ticking clock and even though we've enjoyed successes in the past. Even though the renewables rollout is going rather well, even though we're getting some pretty positive developments coming from China and to a certain, but perhaps lesser extent, from the EU, it's all too little, too late from the point of view of avoiding like genuinely dangerous degrees of warming. So I mean we need significantly greater levels of ambition than we were seeing even before Trump's reelection in warming. So I mean we need significantly greater levels of ambition than we were seeing even before Trump's re-election in November. So unfortunately, I think there's a little bit more in the pessimist column, for the time being at least.
Speaker 2:You talk about it being too little, too late, given the kind of strategy we've got at the moment, which is already being weakened, in fact, not just by the United States. With your book you have seen the consequences of that and reading some parts of that I was really interested that I thought I knew the link between climate change and conflict. I hear in Geneva, UN aid agencies, the World Food Programme, the Red Cross Federation deals with natural disasters. They talk about it a lot and yet the examples you were giving are much more in some way subtle, perhaps below the radar. I'd really be interested in you telling our listeners a few of those.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I mean, I've spent the past decade and a bit working to articulate both the extent of climate's contribution to violence but most particularly also the manner in which climate contributes to forms of conflict, large and small, and I guess the sort of headline rationale for doing this is that, I mean, to my mind, there's perhaps no manifestation of climate change more in your face or more arresting than the kinds of violence that it's increasingly leaving in its wake. And this I mean, this violence takes many, many different forms. I mean, between about 2014 and 2017, I was heavily focused, sort of working across different parts of Iraq and Syria trying to lay out how ISIS had benefited tremendously from collapsing agricultural conditions to bolster its ranks, the idea being that without kind of climate and wider environmental induced difficulties in farming areas, the group never would have been able to grow as large and as deadly as it soon became. But then I mean, much of this climate-related violence is much less headline-grabbing, much less dramatic than massive jihadi groups roving across patches of territory the size of Great.
Speaker 2:Britain. Actually, the Bangladesh example is one that fascinated me. Tell our listeners about that, because I think this is something people perhaps would never have dreamt of. We know about rising sea levels. We know that it is reducing people's ability to fish or grow crops, but this particular development hadn't expected.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, I mean.
Speaker 3:So I spent a chunk of time over the course of a bunch of different assignments working in southern Bangladesh, and my assignment, or at least my early ones, were targeted on kind of articulating some of the kind of forms of climate stress there that the average person across the world is perhaps relatively well acquainted with, the ways in which more and more people are losing their livelihoods to rising seas and ever stronger cyclones and a bunch of other climate stresses and shocks.
Speaker 3:But while I was working there, much to my surprise came across one of these many low-level, localized, geopolitically largely insignificant instances in which climate change contributes to violence, and that was that as rising seas sort of eat away at many of the fields on which sort of local farmers almost entirely depend, more and more of these people are kind of seeking alternative livelihoods, fishing in the longtime pirate infested coastal waterways, and all of them are acutely aware of the dangers that come with plying their trade in these sort of classic bandit lairs, but they feel that that really is their only option.
Speaker 3:But as the volume of kind of hostages because that's the way in which the pirates mostly derive a living as the volume of hostages has increased, so too has the number of pirates, because there's just so much available kind of human lucre that it's sort of worth the while of these groups to sort of tolerate the deep unpleasantness that comes with sort of negotiating jungle conditions and diseases and snakes and tigers and crocodiles and this kind of A to Z of complications. So yeah, just one of many, many examples that we see across the world in which the lives of ordinary people are being rendered basically totally intolerable by a bunch of climate related security challenges.
Speaker 2:So, basically, rising sea levels have deprived coastal farmers of their livelihood. They try their hand at fishing, but this is notoriously lawless territory. There are pirates. The pirates have now developed a new business mode which is kidnapping the people who are trying to fish and extorting money from their families. So climate change is fueling insecurity, violence and crime.
Speaker 3:It is, and I mean perhaps the best characterization of climate change's contribution to violence globally is. It's basically applying tremendous pressure to whatever place or society's existing weaknesses are, and that's a big, big problem globally, because we have so many fissures that can be exploited from inequality to misinformation, to corruption, to state brutality. And just the more intense the climate stress has become globally, the more pressure it is applying to these situations, which often need little encouragement to worsen.
Speaker 2:You're a journalist, so am I. Climate change now is increasingly. We see a lot of misinformation and disinformation and a revival of this idea, which we thought had been put to bed, that it doesn't really exist. It's our job to actually lay out the facts. How do you do that now? How would you compellingly tackle the misinformation?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think I'd be. It's one of these classic cases in which I'd be an exceedingly rich man if I had a strong answer to that one. I mean, I guess, to recast the question in a kind of slightly optimistic way, we know that the vast majority of people across both rich and poor parts of the world both believe climate change to be real and are clamoring for climate action. I mean, recent studies suggest that about 89% of people globally want climate change to be tackled in some kind of meaningful way. Equally, we know that percentage tends to drop rather precipitously if people are told that, well, that action will come with a price tag and a cost that will potentially hit them personally for at least a period of time. All of which is to say, that kind of misinformation, I think, is, in the broad scheme of things, a less sort of devastating obstacle than so many of us sometimes think.
Speaker 3:The trouble is, I think, that so many of our elected leaders, particularly in the US, have proven extra susceptible to misinformation and disinformation, and so I guess it's more the nature of the people that are kind of falling afoul of proverbial fake news than the sheer number that is problematic.
Speaker 3:I would say that it's during periods in which climate stresses are just too obvious and too terrifyingly in your face to ignore, the clamor for action tends to increase. So when we're gearing up for a summer like this one, in which we've had a relatively dry winter, in which we've got the makings of yet another kind of wildfire and drought-ridden next few months, well, surprise, surprise and totally unsurprisingly, those tend to be the periods in which the average man or woman on the street is just that bit more convinced of the necessity of getting out there and lobbying and taking kind of necessary, painful action than they are during kind of more temperate, less unpleasant periods of the year. So while all of us kind of wish for a summer that's not characterized by the sorts of horrors that so many European summers increasingly have been, that may well be the necessary price in order to get various initiatives off the ground.
Speaker 2:Peter Schwarzstein leading us to the conclusion that maybe, as with pandemics and COVID-19, we are doomed to learn every lesson the hard way. And that's it from this edition of Inside Geneva. We hope you enjoyed the programme. Do drop us a line at insidegeneva, at swissinfoch, to tell us what you think. My thanks to Peter Schwarzstein and Zaid Rad Al-Hussein for their time and their analysis. Join us next time on Inside Geneva, where we'll be looking at the proposed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Is it a way to finally get aid into Gaza, or is it, as many longstanding aid workers fear, a politicization of humanitarian principles?
Speaker 4:We would welcome anything that would allow us to resume work for a population that is starving and that has been suffocated by a siege over two months, but this seems to be militarized, politicized, manipulated. People have to walk long distances through the rubble to get aid, and it is then some kind of a military scheme that decides whom will get it, how they will get it and if they will get it so, it is in violation of basic humanitarian principles.
Speaker 2:Check out our previous episodes how the International Red Cross unites prisoners of war with their families, or why survivors of human rights violations turn to the UN in Geneva for justice. I'm Imogen Folks. Thanks again for listening you.
