Where’s My Money, Dude? Climate Change and COP27: The Road to Extinction

COP27- here we go again….it is now 30 years since the first Rio conference that set out to bring the leaders of the world together to tackle climate change, or global overheating, and the sixth mass extinction as I prefer to call it. With homo sapiens directly in the firing line of that tough old mother of all extinctions, Nature. That’s right, five mass extinctions since life began on earth, and humans have now triggered the sixth, which could wipe out 90% of life on earth, including most of us, unless we take urgent action.

Have we learned anything since Rio1 in 1992?

In April 1992 I was part of a team that put together the first Sustainable Energy Lending policy for the World Bank before the first Rio Conference. After months of interviewing several dozen of the world’s authorities on energy and finance, we brought together UNEP, Shell, and 30 global experts for a week in a priory just outside Oxford to thrash out what was needed to create a sustainable future, based on the Brundtland Commission’s recommendations back in 1987.

The United Nations Brundtland Commission defined sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Today, there are almost 140 developing countries in the world…