Prince Charles Interview:
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"We need to make
mainstream alternative"
http://www.stern.de/wissenschaft/natur/:Prinz-Charles-Interview-We/700507.html
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Kämpft seit Jahren gegen die Zerstörung der Umwelt: Der britische
Thronfolger Prinz Charles
Von Cornelia Fuchs, London
Your Royal Highness, for decades you have been warning about damage to
the natural balance of our planet. Where has this conviction to protect
the environment come from and do you feel vindicated that your work is
now recognized on a global scale after years of lacklustre
support?
I have always been someone who prefers action to words, in the hope
that I can, in some small way, help to maintain this planet for future
generations. I suppose more than anything my motivation is that I do not
want my children and grandchildren, or anyone else's for that matter,
saying to me "Why didn't you do something when it was possible to
make a difference and when you knew what was happening?"
As a teenager in the early 1960's, I felt deeply about the wanton
destruction of so much of our natural and built environment and of the
imposition of an ideology that saw progress as purely linear and
mechanistic and which, in the process, discarded so much accumulated
wisdom and knowledge. I felt desperately the loss of balance that this
entailed, and all I have been trying to do for these past decades is to
right the balance. Hence I believe it is essential that from now on we
rediscover how to work in harmony with Nature, rather than against her.
There needs to be a balanced and integrated approach to how we live on
this planet, so that we are a part of, and not apart from, Nature and her
underlying patterns of which we are a microcosm.
Whether I am vindicated or not isn't really the point. There is no
pleasure in being proved right when that means that the world finds
itself facing such imminent and catastrophic danger. How I wish that we
had not ended up in the position that we now find ourselves. But I have
to say that, to me, it feels as if we are in the process of quite
literally testing the world to destruction as we accumulate increasing
evidence of the collapse of natural ecosystems all around us - ecosystems
on which we all crucially depend. What would give me the greatest
possible reward would be if the world took the urgent action needed, as
indicated by all the science of climate change and by the melting of the
Arctic and Antarctic ice caps, to prevent the credit crunch rapidly
becoming an infinitely more dangerous climate and ecosystems
crunch.
We truly are at a defining moment in history. The threat of climate
change is simply too important to ignore. However, there is still reason
to believe that there is a short time left to improve the situation and
achieve greater global sustainability. But I fear it is a very small
window of opportunity that is left open to usŠ
How important were visits to the Amazonian rainforest, and other parts
of the world, for you to understand the climate change issue? Would you
be so kind to share a memory of such a visit that made a lasting impact
on you?
Clearly, it makes a big difference to have visited rainforest
countries if the impact of climate change is to be fully understood, but
during the course of my life I have travelled a great deal on countless
official visits and have kept my eyes and ears open, thus forming my own
impressions of what was happening. I have been lucky enough to meet all
sorts of people from many different fields and to pick their brains. I
have seen, and heard of, many different projects that are making a big
difference to people's lives and to their environments, mainly through
offering an alternative, more holistic approach than the conventional
form of development which, quite frankly, has often been partly the cause
of the environmental disintegration we are witnessing.
This is why I have supported genuinely sustainable, "organic"
farming for so long; why I have battled on behalf of small farmers and
grass roots communities all around the world; why I have equally
struggled for a more humane approach to the built environment that
recognizes local and cultural identity, rather than the imposition of a
monoculture of techno-global uglification. To meet the imminent threat of
catastrophic climate change, I would suggest we need to make mainstream
what has up to now been dismissed as "alternative".
For
instance, what made a lasting impact on me was a visit to the
Permaculture Institute in the Amazon. In little more than a decade, this
remarkable project has integrated agroforestry, aquaculture, and multiple
animal systems within a restored landscape that had been utterly
destroyed by deforestation. The whole now forms a Virtuous Circle within
which all the necessary animal feed is grown and biofuels for the farm
vehicles and machinery are produced. What is so deeply impressive is the
practical way in which the Institute demonstrates how genuine
sustainability can be achieved by applying the principles it has
developed.
There is nothing
"alternative" in these underlying principles. Indeed, I believe
they are of the greatest importance if we are to chart a new and more
stable course to live in harmony with Nature, rather than trying
pointlessly to gain mastery over her. Only in this way can we hope to
mitigate the terrible effects of climate change.
At the meeting of world
leaders that you convened at St. James's Palace on 1st April, you
presented US Secretary Hillary Clinton as well as several heads of state
with the idea of Your Royal Highness's Rainforests Project. Why should we
pay billions of dollars to other nations to save their rainforest in a
time of a world-wide recession?
The conservation of the world's
rainforests is absolutely crucial for the welfare not just of the
Rainforest Nations themselves, but of the entire planet. Tropical
deforestation is one of the major drivers of global warming. It is
responsible for around seventeen per cent of world-wide carbon emissions
- more than the entire global transport system combined. The rainforests
provide the rainfall that helps crops grow around the world as well as
helping clean the air that we breathe and absorbing carbon on a vast
scale. They are also the repository of a vast array of biodiversity
without which humanity cannot survive on this planet. Quite simply, they
are a massive global utility helping to sustain life as we know it.
Without them, humanity will struggle to survive. Therefore, we have no
choice but to keep them standing, whether there is a recession or not. If
we lose the rainforests, and the essential ecosystem services they
provide to the planet, then the economic costs we will all face - not
just those who live in the Rainforest Nations - will be far, far greater
than anything we are seeing today.
As it happens, the experts agree that preserving the rainforests is one
of the cheapest and quickest ways to reduce carbon emissions and to
mitigate the damaging effects of global warming, thereby buying us
precious time as we struggle to create genuinely low carbon economies by
developing new, cleaner technologies. But such technologies are at least
seven to ten years away from being implemented at scale and so we have to
introduce an emergency package to save the rainforests in the
meantime.
We must also not forget that some 1.4 billion of the poorest people in
the world depend for their livelihoods upon the rainforests, so financial
support to maintain the forests is essential to help these vulnerable
communities and to establish better integrated rural development
projects.
And, apart from anything else, since
the developed half of the world has helped, albeit unwittingly, to bring
about the problem in the first place, not only by emitting vast
quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, but also by creating the demand
for soya, palm oil and timber which is causing the rainforests to be
destroyed so rapidly, it surely has to be fair that it should now help to
pay for the vital services provided by the rainforests. In any case, we
pay for our water, gas and electricity - now we need to see the
rainforests as a giant global utility. And we must never forget that it
is the health and stability of the global environment that sustains our
economy and not the other way round.
How do you want to ensure that
rainforest trees will soon be worth more alive than dead? And how will
this help prevent climate change?
From the beginning, the aim of my
Rainforests Project has been to consult as widely as possible and to seek
out and develop solutions to the problem of deforestation by working with
the private, public and N.G.O. sectors to create a global
partnership.
Encouragingly, proposals are beginning to emerge as to how the 10-15
billion dollars per year needed to make a significant impact might be
raised. One of the proposals being considered is my Project's own idea
for the issuing of new, government-backed rainforest bonds which would
raise money to support sustainable forms of economic development that do
not involve destroying the rainforests. The bonds would be offered to the
investment community and could provide companies in, for example, the
pensions and insurance sectors with guaranteed returns while, at the same
time, making available some of the significant resources needed to help
slow down deforestation. It is perfectly possible to structure such bonds
so that the repayment to the investors by governments is deferred, to
everyone's benefit, to a future date. This would be helpful to
governments currently grappling with the recession. I think it is
important to note that the use of a Rainforest Bond means that it would
be possible to raise much larger sums from the private sector now than
would ever normally be provided from traditional overseas aid
budgets.
Crucially, the payments of money from the bonds would be linked to agreed
targets for forest conservation and countries would only be paid if the
rainforests stayed intact. This would place a substantial value on the
standing forests and create strong incentives for governments,
communities and individuals in Rainforest Nations to address the drivers
of deforestation, while giving them the means to pursue sustainable,
low-carbon development. The meeting I held at St. James's Palace a month
ago with Chancellor Merkel, President Sarkozy, Secretary Clinton and
other international leaders before the G20 Summit led to an agreement to
work further on these and other proposals so that they could initially be
considered at the G8 meeting in July with a final assessment and, I hope,
commitment to action by the time of the World Bank Annual Meeting in
October. If such a commitment emerges, then I believe that it could lead
to a significant and rapid reduction in tropical deforestation and the
carbon emissions that that entails.
In your key note speech on
climate change in Rio de Janeiro, you pointed out that the world has less
than 100 months left to work against climate change. Do you fear that the
current economic downturn will prevent schemes like the Rainforests
Project's to go ahead as planned?
There is a real danger that the
current recession will cause a critical delay in addressing the urgent
issues I have mentioned - and you only have to visit, as I did, the
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and to talk to its eminent
team of scientists and economists, led by Professor Joachim Schellnhuber,
who is a member of the Nobel Prize winning International Panel on Climate
Change, to realize just how incredibly alarming the issues are.
This is why I have been devoting so much time and effort to building a
global partnership between the private, public and N.G.O. sectors over
the past eighteen months and why I am trying to answer these questions
you have posed me. At the end of the day, if we can put together a global
membership campaign that signs up not only major private sector
corporations, the Media and N.G.O.'s, but also members of the public and
entire communities around the world in an effort to halt rainforest
deforestation, then we will make it a great deal easier for the
international leaders gathered in Copenhagen in December to take the
necessary decisions.
Equally, I believe there is a far greater likelihood of persuading India
and China and the rest of the developing world to agree to what needs to
be done to address the threat of catastrophic climate change, and the
collapse of ecosystems, if the developed world acknowledges its
responsibility for creating the crisis by making it possible for what the
Rainforests Project is proposing - in other words, an innovative way of
paying the rainforest countries for the ecosystem services they provide -
to go ahead for all our sakes.
What I keep trying to convince people is that whatever difficulties the
world is experiencing now as a result of the global financial crisis,
they are as nothing compared to what will happen if the full effects of
climate change start to materialize: war, famine, social instability and
shortage of water are predicted by people far more knowledgeable than me
- many of them at the Potsdam Institute. On the bright side, there is
also a growing sense that many countries are beginning to see the
creation of low carbon businesses as one of the best ways out of the
recession - and that would be better news for climate change.
You just returned from a visit to
Berlin. May we ask what was the most enjoyable part of your stay in
Germany?
For me, perhaps the most enjoyable
and, indeed, remarkable part of our visit was being able to stay in the
rebuilt Adlon Hotel in what used to be the old East Berlin, looking out
from my room at the Brandenburg Gate. For someone like myself, who was
born in 1948 and who spent so much of my life during the Cold War,
feeling deeply for a divided German people, witnessing the building of
the Berlin Wall and visiting Berlin on many occasions to see British
troops stationed there, it was not only an extraordinary experience, but
also immensely heartening to see the restoration and rebuilding that has
taken place since my last visit. It was also marvellous to be able to
commemorate the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Allied efforts during the
Berlin Airlift which helped to secure the city's future and in which my
country played such an important part.
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