20.4: The Future of Global Environmental Governance and Human Security

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It is time for global governance to evolve. The charts show our trajectories and the data is clear: a rapidly changing climate, mass species extinctions, the acidification of our oceans, the collapse of fisheries – our current approach to global environmental crises is not enough and the foundations of human life, of human security, are crumbling. It is time to look at its purpose, its principles, its parties, its practice, to see what is working and not working, and to move forward courageously and comprehensively.

Most movements for justice have been a response to witnessing great injustices – and great injustices are everywhere. We live in a global geopolitical climate where powerful nations and organisations unduly control the dialogue, the negotiations, and the rules which govern them, and govern us all. We live in a world where states, and those entities under their jurisdiction, can harm without consequence, a world where vulnerable people are made more insecure, not by their own actions, but by the actions of consumers and producers thousands of miles away. We live in a world where nationalism is rising as high as the walls these nations are trying to build, purposefully denying aid to those seeking refuge due to climate-exacerbated emergencies – emergencies that they have not even caused. This is not fair, this is not just, this is not sustainable. States are turning inward at the very moment that life on Earth demands them to look beyond themselves, and to the relationships with those around them.

Our notions of state sovereignty must be re-assessed. Our notions of global justice must be re-assessed. Our notions of care, community, and responsibility must be re-assessed. A global environmental body, constitution, or court could help move GEG, but it would not be enough. It would still be a disconnected ‘environmental’ approach that is in competition with other sectors, and it likely would not rise to the seriousness that our existential environmental and human crises require. The environment is cross-cutting, and foundational to all else. A global governance body that sets the protection of the environment – the foundations of life – as its fundamental concern could possibly work, if the environment is made central to all other decisions and if states are willing to re-define or limit their own sovereignty out of concern for the global whole, in light of their relations to one another, as opposed to the power of their single self.

Ubuntu has been used as an ethical and legal principle to help address great injustices in a state. It is now time to expand these principles of inter-connectedness and reconciliation to our global environment, natural and geopolitical. For the future of life, we must embrace a more systematic, relational understanding of not only the environment or security, but of humanity, of the state, and of the global community.