LEAD IS 2011 Session 3 - Notes by Brian Smith, LEAD Canada - Cohort 3

Simon Upton: The Green Growth Agenda, competencies to drive change. Green growth is not a paradigm, a panacea, not about Climate and low carbon. It is an analytical lens, a way to use natural assets sustainably. Ensuring that poor use of assets doesn't use them all up. Need 3 things:
1) Managing natural assets seriously, knowing how to measure them, having all the elements quantified.
2) Knowing the cost effectiveness of policies and practises we use - we need the cheapest, most basic ways to do things.
3) Innovation in policies, to reconcile resource use and production, through new technologies.

Rio +20 will only be useful if it can find a way forward for growth and development - more green or more brown?, but growth.

Stephen Lewis: He began with a comment about OECD, and his disappointment with their work on development. He suggests that UNEP has a model of green economy now, something OECD should read. He is also critical about the "cheaper" - poverty needs resources, not cheap and efficient.

Sustainable Development as a concept from Brundtland - meeting present needs without compromising the future. The Rio Conference produced a convention on climate change that has produced little change on the part of corporations and nations. He spoke of an earlier Toronto Conference that he had chaired that set targets, and an Indonesian speaker that spoke about being impacted by richer countries - still the central issue. The Millenium Development Goals, which were created in response to globalization, spoke first about poverty and hunger. These are the most critical elements of SD and the MD. We still loose too many children and mothers to simple illness and childbirth. He spoke briefly about all 8 MD goals, and the 2015 Target.  These goals have become part of national public policies, and must be integrated into Green Growth. The Stearn Report linked all of the new energy ideas to climate change and carbon. But this move to a GE must also address climate change, and the misery that is impacting people (even today, with flooding in Thailand).  For those who Lead, we must link to the climate impacts that threaten people everywhere.  Read the Weathermakers and similar books.

Poverty is a key issue, and the World Bank has again confirmed that more than a billion people are poor, are hungary every day. GE ideas must impact poverty and hunger. The IPCC has made it clear that Southern Africa, where poverty and ill health (AIDS) have weakened so many people. Climate change is bringing more drought, more pain. The inequalities between the developed and undeveloped world must be rectified, observed in all GE initiatives.

Food practises in developed countries, including subsidy and land acquisition in developing countries to serve corporate objectives, takes food from poor countries. He said there was not enough LEAD IS reading is about gender. Gender issues are critical, and empowering women is essential. He spoke about the UN Women, a new agency created just this year, influencing programs on the ground.

Extractive industries continue to impact the environment, and the Tar Sands, and LEAD's links to them is a concern. Corporate support of oil, diamonds and other resources impacts poor countries and operates within terrible instances of illness, rape and poverty. Rebel groups in the Congo use rape as a tool to take control of mineral resources and the money that they can make from them. Barrick Gold, a Canadian mining firm has been linked to the killing of local miners, to regular rapes by security guards protecting their mine.  Why is extraction linked to sexual violence? There are corporations that do good work, but they need more encouragement, more regulation.

The current economic "crisis" is not - wars like Iraq, bank bailouts and other economic purposes are funded - why isn't poverty??  We must create a more decent, civilized and humane environment.