At the dawn of a new millennium the world started to wake up to the fact that
perhaps the current path of development was unsustainable.
Now, you can start to see the inherent tension between, on the one hand,
the need to lift one citizens out of extreme poverty,
and the recognition that industrialization was causing the planet to burn.
After all, if industrialization has been
the principal driver of lifting people out of poverty over the last 150,
200 years, how do you morally tell a country that they can't do the same thing?
Now to be fair, this tension was identified some years ago.
In fact, all the way back to 1992 in the Rio Earth Summit
following the leadership of then Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland,
you did have this concept of sustainable development start to emerge.
The very idea that every country has a right to development,
but it should be done in a way which is conscious of our impact on the planet.
Critically though, environmental concerns caught into this concept of
sustainable development cannot be used as an
excuse to deny a country's right to develop
and, the developed world has an obligation,
as the collection of countries with
the greatest responsibility for climate change so far,
to support this development,
ensure it is done in the right manner
and that poorer countries are ultimately not penalized.
However, for a long time after 1992 the two agendas,
climate change on the one hand,
and an extreme poverty on the other,
and the movements behind them rarely spoke to one another.
The narratives, the stories that campaigners
told rarely interacted with one another.
It was as if the two were completely separate.
There were lots of blame games
and fingers pointing that stalled agreement for a long time.
At worst, it seemed that the success of one of
these agendas would be to the detriment of the other,
it was seen as a zero sum game.
Fast forward to 2009,
and you saw this tension vividly played out in a 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations.
Despite the high expectations of campaigners,
the world failed to secure a global agreement on carbon emissions
and what became rapidly apparent in the media and around the world,
was that there was a great impasse emerging
between developed countries on the one hand,
and emerging countries on the other.
Emerging countries who quite rightly were saying,
why should we be penalized?
Why should we not have the ability to lift our citizens out of extreme poverty?
And what if you want us to reduce our carbon emissions,
or put a cap on our growth,
what are you going to do to help us meet the expectations of our citizens?
Finally, several years after that in 2015,
things reached a fever pitch.
Thanks to the leadership of many individuals,
but in particular one individual that stands
out is former Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki Moon.
Thanks to his leadership,
deals and trade-offs were made.
You saw China and the US,
the two biggest carbon emitters,
under Xi Jinping and Obama come together in a landmark agreement in 2014.
Out goes inconvenient truth to follow up to that inconvenient sequel,
shows how this tension played out between emerging countries,
developed countries, and actually how in some respects it started to be solved.
You saw how India's support for a global agreement was partly achieved,
through businesses agreeing to donate technology at zero cost to
developed countries that would allow them to adapt to a low-carbon emission world.
Other initiatives like the Green Climate Fund also
began pledging and promising to provide finance countries,
to help countries mitigate climate change
and also adapt to its worst impacts.
Now, whilst this was going on in 2015,
and it looked like finally the world was starting to achieve
a breakthrough and these two agendas were starting to come together,
activists from each movement were starting to talk to one another,
policy makers were realizing that perhaps
there is a way to mitigate climate change and also
meet the aspirations of citizens
around the world looking for a way out of extreme poverty.
We got to play a small role, my organization,
Global Citizen, we were asked by the president of the World Bank,
Jim Kim, to organize a big event as
finance ministers converged in Washington D.C. in April 2015.
We did the event on Earth Day,
it was called Global Citizen Earth Day.
Some 270,000 people gathered together on the National Mall.
They chanted out and they cried for sustainable development,
they cried for agreement to end extreme poverty by
2030 and mitigate climate change once and for all.
Finance ministers just across the road could hear this noise,
they could hear it loud and clear,
and Kim himself played a key role in showing
the world just how it was possible to end
extreme poverty by 2030 while
simultaneously avoiding the worst effects of climate change.
The paring together of these two agendas
and the coming together of the movements behind them,
finally resulted in agreement in late 2015,
at the United Nations of the Sustainable Development Goals.
A 17 point plan by the UN to reduce the spread of inequality and extreme poverty
and mitigate climate change.
Just a few months later,
you had the historic Paris Climate Agreement
come together in December 2015, in Paris.
Moving beyond the developed developing country dichotomy,
which had characterized and stored negotiations
for a long time, these agreements,
the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change,
provide a road map for ending extreme poverty,
and crucially for the first time put a deadline on achieving that goal, 2030.
But also, critically, what that road map provides,
is a way for ending extreme poverty in a way that does not boil the planet.
Ban Ki-moonDistinguished Chair Professor
