![]() The economic and human toll of extreme weather events, droughts, floods and lost natural habitats are forcing all but the extreme fringe to acknowledge the danger. Nineteen of the 20 hottest years in recorded history have occurred in the first 19 years of this century. Nature itself is crying out at a volume that grows each year. 1) Evidence That Can No Longer Be Ignored None of these on their own will bring about the required tipping point, but combined and in concert with smart political outreach, they can provide momentum for real systemic change. So, as we enter 2020, why are we at WRI redoubling our efforts in the belief that this year – and the coming decade – can be different? We believe that seven factors provide a degree of hope that simply didn’t exist a decade ago. It is no wonder pundits have dubbed the past 10 years as “The Decade of Distrust” and “The Decade of Disillusionment.” Still Hopeful? At the Madrid climate conference in December 2019, negotiators couldn’t agree on the time horizon for increased ambition, the basic rules for carbon markets or, in fact, almost anything at all. The 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets, set 10 years ago, are largely unmet. Worsening inequality within countries, and feelings of disempowerment and resentment among those left behind by globalization and technological change have focused attention internally rather than towards any global good. But in the five years since, we’ve seen little willingness to compromise for the common good. For a brief moment, it appeared that perhaps the era of cooperation could be rekindled. In 2015, the world witnessed agreement on the Sustainable Development Goals and on climate action under the Paris Agreement. ![]() The past decade has not been humanity’s proudest moment, although there was a remarkable exception in the middle of the decade. ![]() Today a million species are threatened with extinction. ![]() In the past 10 years alone, global emissions of greenhouse gases have been greater than total emissions in the two centuries from 1750 to 1950, and scientists believe biodiversity loss to be proceeding at 1,000 times the natural rate. But when it comes to collective action to protect global public goods, the governments of the world simply haven’t been up to it. Real global output and incomes have much more than doubled since 1992, poverty has been reduced at a pace unparalleled in human history, life expectancy has increased dramatically, and technological progress has been stunning. In other areas, there have been great achievements. Nearly three decades on, we are further from a solution on these issues than we were then. But to everybody in the room, it was clear that this was a moment of clear moral purpose, a coming together of the global community to address critical global threats that no individual nation could tackle on its own. Negotiations had been tough, and some leaders were more enthusiastic than others. It seems like a lifetime ago when at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, I watched more than 100 heads of state and government queue to sign the original documents of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Biodiversity Convention and Agenda 21.
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