A Two-headed monster:
Links between the Climate Change Treaty and the Biodiversity Treaty
By Tom McFeely
To those unschooled in the euphemistic language and hidden goals of the UN and its allies among radical non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the title of a seminar held this wekend in a conference room on the sixth floor of an office building in downtown Kyoto probably seemed innocuous enough. Participants and observers attending the negotiations to amend the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) were cordially invited to "Forging the Link: Climate Change and Biodiversity," a seven-hour gabfest staged to "discuss linking these two top global environmental concerns." But for those with a better acquaintance with the cynical drive by UN-related agencies and green NGOs to dictate human affairs, the Saturday get-together provided a revealing glimpse of the sinister interconnectedness of the two groups -- and of how they intend to further hijack the UN process to pursue their shadowy goals.
At the core of the UN-NGO alliance is
Maurice Strong, a multimillionaire Canadian-born businessman who has devoted much of
the last 30 years to orchestrating the alliance's
"global governance" campaign. Strong, who
currently serves as the UN's Under Secretary
for Reform, as chairman of the Earth Council,
and as special advisor to the World Bank, was
not at the seminar himself. (However, he
arrived in Kyoto on Monday to personally
deliver UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's
appeal that national delegates sign on to
coercive targets for reductions of emissions of
so-called "greenhouse gases" like carbon
dioxide.) But even in his absence, Strong's
influence was evident everywhere at the
downtown gathering; for one thing, three of
the 12 sponsoring groups -- the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the World Bank -- are international agencies
over which he exerts a direct and powerful influence.
The other co-sponsors encompassed some of the heaviest hitters among the environmental NGO establishment, including the World Conservation Union (also known by the acronym IUCN), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the World Resources Institute (WRI). All are also intimately intertwined with the Strong empire through such things as the Earth Council participation, regular infusions of funds from Strong-dominated UN agencies, and their leaders' close personal ties to Strong.
However, media accounts routinely protray groups like the WRI, IUCN, and the World Wide Fund as private, unaffiliated organizations. In reality, all three are classic examples of what critics have dubbed "private government organizations," or PGOs. Every year, each of the three "NGOs" receives millions and tens of millions more from supportive UN agencies. "Joint projects among these PGOs and the United Nations Environment Programe include: World Conservation Strategy; Global Biodiversity Strategy, and for all practical purposes, Agenda 21 [the official platform of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which was chaired by Maurice Strong]; the Convention on Biological Diversity; the Global Biodiversity Assessment; and the Framework Convention on Climate Change," reports World Concerns, a newsletter published in Kyoto by Sovereignty International.
In the April 1996 report of the Global Environment Facility, World Concerns reports the three environmental groups were listed as "Executing Agency" or "Collaborating Organization" for no less than 29 different grants. The total amount thereby funneled through the so-called "NGOs": a staggering $350 million.
This incestuous relationship between international agencies and pseudo-NGOs -- and the pro-environmentalist, anti-life Clinton Administration -- was painfully clear among the panelists at the Kyoto "Forging the Link" conference. After an introductory address by Japanese parliamentarian Akiko Domoto, an IUCN Councillor for East Asia, the first panelist to speak was Robert Watson. Watson was recently named as the new chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the agency set up in 1988 by UNEP and another UN agency, the World Meteorological Organization, to lay the propaganda groundwork for the entire global-warming campaign. Watson is also currently serving as director for environment at the World Bank, a position he assumed after leaving his job as the associate director for environment in Bill Clinton's executive office.
"Scientific" Linkage
Watson outlined the "scientific" rationale for linking a new FCCC protocol on binding reductions of emissions to the existing UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The biodiversity strategy mandates the creation of huge interconnected "protected areas," within which human activities are to be sharply curtailed or banned altogether to preserve allegedly threatened "ecosystems." The FCCC, meanwhile, aims to steeply reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases produced by industrial activity, on the scientifically unproven grounds that such gases are responsible for dangerously heating the earth. Watson treated his audience to a slick slide presentation that purported to demonstrate how the warmest areas of the world, which are the most prolific regions in terms of total species of life, would be injured by man-induced global heating. At the same time, he claimed, it was essential to advance the protected areas campaign so that they can serve as reservoirs to repopulate ecosystems that will supposedly be blighted by continued global warming and other environmental degradation.
The rampant illogic at the heart of this argument was at no time addressed by Watson, or by any of the subsequent speakers arguing for the linkage of the climate-change and biological-diversity conventions. That is, given the irrefutable fact that it is warm areas that are the most fecund in terms of species, a warming of the Earth should serve to advance the cause of species diversity, not injure it. After all, glaciers and other cold-climate features are hardly conducive environments for terrestrial life.
Characteristically undismayed by the weakness of his arguments, Watson concluded by stating the UN-NGO case for gaining sweeping domination over the globe's governments and economies. After lamenting such things as the "market failure to recognize the value of biodiversity," the "institutional failure to properly regulate use of natural resources," and the "fragmentation" of valuable ecosystems, Watson finished with a bold proclamation. "We have to correct market failures," he declared. "We have to correct the way people think about the environment."
Next up was Jeff McNeely, who holds the title of "chief scientist" of the IUCN, an organization where Maurice Strong formerly served as a director. McNeely opened by applauding Watson's status at the World Bank. "I'm glad someone like Bob is at the World Bank, getting people to think carefully about the issues we care about."
Ominously, McNeely started his own presentation by displaying some charts that compared increases in population with increasing energy use and food consumption. The implication was clear: the earth's root ecological problem is a surplus of human beings. Global warming -- "particularly when coupled with population growth" -- will lead to a loss of biodiversity, McNeely warned. "This is basically the problem we're dealing with all the time."
Like Watson, McNeely cited the protected-areas initiative as the key to preserving "genetic reservoirs" that could mitigate this gloomy prediction of species disappearance. Neither man, however, chose to make explicit the anti-humanity premises underlying leading protected-areas offshoots like the Wildlands Project proposal formulated in 1992 by eco-terrorist Dave Foreman and his collaborator Reed Noss, a University of Idaho environmental scientist. Noss has admitted that he would ideally like to see 95% of North America placed within environmental set-asides, while Foreman has advocated that the world's population be reduced by 98%, pruning it to just 100 million from its current total of roughly six billion.
During a brief question-and-answer session after Watson and McNeely's presentations, an audience member asked why there has been so little discussion of population-control measures in the FCCC negotiations, if population was indeed so central to climate change and biodiversity loss. "Your point that we should be looking at population is absolutely well taken," IPCC head Watson replied, "but it's such a thorny issue politically it is never undertaken in these discussions."
In large measure, the "thorniness" Watson was referring to is the widespread hostility the UN faces from Catholic and Moslem nations who vigorously resist the UN's efforts to impose abortion and contraceptive-based population-control programs on their nations. But Watson assured his audience that UN agencies have already secured the opening they need to implement population-control programs, courtesy of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. "I believe we already have the right basis of looking at the population."
Population and the environment
After Watson finished explaining how the UN intended to forge ahead with population control as a means of protecting the environment, UNDP policy director Anders Wijkman stood up in the audience. After praising Watson and McNeely's presentations, Wijkman delivered a homily about the need for "institution-building" in order to successfully implement the UN's various agendas. The UNDP policy advisor is another prominent example of the UN-NGO linkage that has been so carefully cultivated by Maurice Strong; a stint as director general of the Swedish Nature Conservation Society figures prominently on Wijkman's resume.
In his current position, Wijkman reports to UNDP executive director Gus Speth, who in turn has been charged with serving as Strong's lead bureaucrat in the promotion of the UN's "global governance" initiative. Before being named UNDP executive director, Speth was a member of Bill Clinton's transition team in late 1992 and early 1993. Ten years earlier, he became the first head of the newly created World Resources Institute, a position he held until his brief stint working for the Clinton Administration, which was responsible for his landing the UNDP job (by unwritten UN tradition, the U.S. controls the selection of the chief bureaucrats of both the UNDP and UNICEF, while Russia controls the appointment of chief of military operations).
Early this year, Speth delivered a speech on "global governance" to a Rio+5 review conference convened in Brazil by Strong's Earth Council. In it, UNDP's senior administrator talked about the rationale behind the UN's continuing drive to secure global power. "Global challenges and global needs -- whether economic, environmental or otherwise -- require global solutions and global action," Speth insisted. "Economic and environmental integration lead to political integration. That is global governance."
Later in the speech, Speth highlighted the crucial importance he and Strong attach to strengthening the FCCC. "Perhaps the most far-reaching, powerful development in the area of global governance is the emergence of the World Trade Organization, though it may be that, over time, the global climate convention will actually become even more influential."
NGO pawns of the UN
For his part, Wijkman has been delegated to make the rounds of virtually every UN-NGO get-together, whether at international conferences like Kyoto or at sessions like last month's World Bank briefing at UN headquarters in New York, to bang the drum for the advancement of the global governance structure. Hence his "institution-building" appeal to the Kyoto seminar, an appeal he repeated less than two hours later during a press conference at the FCCC site.
At the press conference, held to unveil a new UNDP "energising Development" initiative to promote investment in climate-change-related technology, Wijkman elaborated on UN efforts to build greater institutional and human "capacity." A leading means of accomplishing this, the UNDP official said, was through direct funding of selected NGOs. In fact, Wijkman continued, the UNDP now uses its pet NGOs as "implementing agents" for UN-sponsored objectives. This is more UN-style obfuscation; the process Wijkman alluded to is a common ruse whereby international agencies can make end runs around apathetic or hostile national or local governments. By working indirectly through its puppet NGOs, the UN can ensure implementaion of programs like abortion and contraceptive-based sex education even where a target government refuses to co-operate in funding such programs or in granting permission to the UN to operate them.
While explaining the UNDP-NGO liaison, Wijkman disingenuously remarked that his agency hadn't "foreseen" this "explosive" expansion of the role of NGOs. That he would make such a comment is scarcely credible; Strong and his surrounding circle of activists have in fact worked tirelessly for three decades to nurture exactly this sort of activist participation. Indeed, the recent "explosion" of NGO activity has taken place specifically because of the massive piping of World Bank and UN funds to green and radical-feminist groups as their sympathizers have tightened their grip on the international agencies.
For example, at last June's Habitat II Conference in Istanbul, World Bank representative Michael Cohen appeared on a panel at the UN Conference's NGO forum along with Bella Abzug, co-chairman of the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) and several other prominent international feminists. Citing the World Bank's planned $15-billion investment in local communities over the next five years, Mr. Cohen promised "qualitative" changes in which "voices" and "realities" received that funding.
Appearing on the same panel, UNDP executive director Speth (who proudly told the Habitat II audience that "I spent my life as an NGO before I got lost in the UN bureaucracy") stressed that it was "extremely important" that feminist NGOs cajole national governments to adopt their radical agenda, while promising to donate $25 million to help in the feminists' efforts to do exactly that.
Generally, senior UN officials are only that forthright about the extent of their symbiotic interaction with radical NGOs when they feel they are safely among like-minded listeners. Back at the NGO get-together in downtown Kyoto less than two hours later, Wijkman felt similarly comfortable about fully expressing his own allegiances. Appearing on the last panel of the day (chaired by WRI president Jonathan Lash), the UNDP policy director grumbled that he was "astonished" that the ongoing FCCC negotiations had gotten bogged down in a "political discussion" over the scope and nature of individual countries' contributions to emissions reductions. The UNDP, Wijkman intimated, wanted to move beyond that sort of distasteful bartering by unenlightened national representatives, and speed ahead with its plans to "merge or integrate" the UN's environmental and social agendas.
After the panelists were done, IUCN "chief scientist" Jeff McNeely returned to the stage for some concluding remarks. After promising that the key elements of the day's discussions would be fed into the FCCC deliberations through a sympathetic national delegation at a timely moment, McNeely commented that he hoped that "Bob Watson makes sure biodiversity is a focus of the IPCC."
Given the tenor of the IPCC chairman's remarks earlier in the day, McNeely's hopes look certain to be realized. And it's every bit as likely that the FCCC's permanent secretariat will be equally committed to following the NGO order to link climate change and biodiversity, no matter what national delegates decide to do in Kyoto. That's because FCCC executive secretary Michael Zammit Cutajar is yet another member of Strong's seemingly bottomless stable of UN and NGO loyalists. Early in his three-decade-long association with the UN bureaucracy, a young Zammit Cutajar worked in 1971 and 1972 as a staff member in Strong's office while Strong served as Secretary General of the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment. In the cozy world of the UN and its activist cohorts, it appears that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
(Tom McFeely is an independent journalist from Canada who covered the Kyoto conference for Human Life International.)