“The words of the decision-makers no longer coincide with the speed of the upheavals of the world”

Et if the failure of the COPs was also a problem of vocabulary? At a time of social, ecological and geopolitical turbulence, and in a rapidly changing world, the decision maker needs to be up to date more than ever. However, we still hear talk of “global warming”, “erosion of biodiversity” or “sustainable development”.

Here, for the convenience of policy makers, is an updated proposal to move beyond these outdated expressions.

Climate “crisis”

Let’s start with “global warming” which might make it seem like our main problem is the thermostat, ie the average temperature of the Earth.

Scientists – notably the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – now speak of a climate “crisis”, because the main problem is not the average temperature: it is the multiple fluctuations – storms, floods, droughts, social crises – which will be more frequent and of greater magnitude.

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To continue talking about global warming when Canada experiences a 50°C heat dome in 2021 or Europe experiences a two-month heat wave in 2022 is semantic denial.

Do you still speak of “erosion of biodiversity”? The rate of disappearance of species on Earth is a hundred to a thousand times greater than in the pre-industrial period and 30% to 40% of species are now threatened with extinction.

Collapse

Scientists, including the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), now speak of biodiversity collapse, simply because it is an established fact. The direct threat to humans is the disappearance of associated ecosystem services: food, biomaterials, medicine, water and air purification or soil regeneration depend on a high level of biodiversity. Once again, to speak of “erosion” and not of “collapse” is like taking an aspirin to avoid seeing reality in the face.

Do you still think that the socio-ecological crisis in which we find ourselves is the product of the domestication of fire, of agriculture, or even of the industrial revolution?

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Once again, if these old developments had their role, scientists (in particular the American chemist Will Steffen and the Stockholm Resilience Center) show that this crisis really took off in 1950, in what some economists still call the “glorious thirty”, and what others, more enlightened, call the “great acceleration”. To ignore the recent nature of the crisis is to refuse to make it a political object. It is to act out our impotence in words.

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