The clock is ticking inexorably towards High Noon before time runs out to resolve the world’s 20 most urgent problems, according to Jean-Francois Rischard, Vice-President for Europe at the World Bank and author of High Noon: 20 global problems; 20 years to solve them.

By Mike Smith, Andrew Stallybrass, Christoph Spreng

The clock is ticking inexorably towards High Noon before time runs out to resolve the world’s 20 most urgent problems, according to Jean-Francois Rischard, Vice-President for Europe at the World Bank and author of High Noon: 20 global problems; 20 years to solve them. ‘There is an urgent need for a new global problem-solving approach and the minutes are ticking away,’ Rischard said, giving the opening address at the 30th annual Caux Conference for Business and Industry, which runs from 11 to 15 July.

Twenty years was the outside limit, he said, though some issues, such as dwindling fish stocks, were much more urgent.

The conference, organised by Caux Initiatives for Business and entitled ‘Globalization…. as if people really mattered’, has attracted some 200 participants from 25 countries.

‘There is not one big fuzzy force of globalization but two forces both running ahead of the world’s ability to deal with them,’ Rischard said. The exponential growth in the world’s population towards eight billion inhabitants (leading to increased scarcities) was accompanying the plentiful growth through new information and knowledge-based economies (shrinking time and distance). But human institutions evolved much more slowly than these exponential forces, and a gap results. ‘This is a very dangerous gap, the biggest challenge of our lifetime,’ Rischard said. Hierarchical government structures were addressing it too slowly.

The most urgent issues were global warming and the need for poverty reduction, at a time when rich countries had reduced their aid efforts by 30 per cent since 1990. The Kyoto Protocol on global warming had still not been ratified but had been so watered down that even in Europe carbon emissions would be reduced by only a few per cent, he said.

Rischard stressed that all 20 issues, ranging from deforestation, biodiversity loss and fisheries depletion to water shortages and the need to overhaul ‘information age’ taxation, were interlinked. He admitted that he had been criticised by a leading physicist for ‘cutting reality into 20 slices of salami’ before he had written his last chapter making the linkages.

A third of the 20 problems were about ‘sharing the planet and its resources’, he continued. Some were about ‘sharing our humanity’, including poverty reduction, peacekeeping, education, health issues such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, and combating terrorism. And some were about ‘sharing our rule book’, including World Trade Organization rules, biotechnology research and the ‘global financial architecture’.

A striking example of effective collective action had been the Montreal protocol on ozone-depleting substances, which had seen an effective reduction in the ozone hole. But this was the exception that proves the rule, he warned.

He advocated ‘global issues networks’ (GINs) comprising of government experts in the relevant fields, international civil society organisations and businesses which would grow over three years to a membership of several hundred participants. They would be able, he argued, to reach a ‘rough consensus’, agreed by at least 70 per cent of participants, towards the necessary action. Such ‘global issue networks’ would have a cross-border legitimacy, and voters would move from asking, ‘What will this politician do for me?’ to ‘Where do you stand on this global issue of the day?’ International standards would be set and countries’ compliance ratings monitored. Rischard advocated a policy of ‘naming and shaming’ countries that failed to comply, similar to recent effective action against money laundering. The cost of solving the 20 issues would not be prohibitive: some $700 billion, less than the world’s annual defence budgets.

There was an urgent need to get these methodological issues discussed, which short G8 summits did not give enough time to. This was the challenge for the younger generation. But he dismissed the idea of global governance as impossible: ‘the European Union has been trying to produce a regional government of 15 countries for the last 50 years!’ he said

Conference Report

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© Caux Initiatives for Business, 2003