Helen Clark: 'We're living as if we had four planets'

Deutsche Welle, 14 May 2013

Sustainability is often not given enough thought in development initiatives. The head of the UN Development Program, Helen Clark, says that needs to change and calls for a "new paradigm" for sustainable development.

DW: Helen Clark, do we need a new definition of development?

Helen Clark: We need a new paradigm and that paradigm is sustainable development. In that paradigm, the development people and the environment people have to talk to each other because if we develop in a way that destroys our ecosystems, we will undermine our potential for human development.  With sustainable development, we have to be looking for ways to lift people's quality of life while we protect the ecosystems we depend on. So we definitely need new thinking about how to integrate these different strains.

By sustainability most people understand an ecologically less harmful practice than what we see today. What would be your definition of sustainable development?

There are three pillars to sustainable development. There is the economic, there is the social and there is the environmental. And by not trying to see these different things as trade-offs against each other, we should look at how we can advance all the goals at the same time. When you look at a sector like energy - if we can transform the world's energy systems it will be better for the environment, it can create cleaner, greener jobs that can secure people's living standards and secure society. In the work we do in the developing world, we very much advocate these triple win approaches.

Do industrialized countries need to find a new definition of development for themselves as well?

At the moment, those of us on Earth are like passengers on a runaway train, living as though we had three to four planets to exploit. We don't have three to four planets to exploit; we have one planet with a growing population, with depleting resources. And yes, we have to change - that was the big message of Rio +20. Now a particular responsibility for leading that change does lie with developed countries, like my own country [New Zealand] or like Germany, because the heavy carbon stock that is in the atmosphere is the one that largely we created. We should be working extremely hard to reduce our own emissions, but we also need the emerging and developing countries to go on a more sustainable path. The big ones can fund themselves - China will fund its own development, India will fund its own development, so will Brazil. But those of us working in development at the UN or in German development cooperation, really need to focus resources on the poor countries that need to build the capacity to find a different pathway.

The latest Worldwatch Institute Report "Is Sustainability Still Possible?" speaks of "sustainababble" - talk instead of action. Do you see areas where action is actually taking place or are we still stuck at the talk level?

Rio+ 20 produced a big outcome document and it said all the right things about the problem. But the international community has not been very good on agreeing on the solutions. We see that with the climate negotiations where the negotiators go back time and time again. We haven't got the breakthrough yet. We need that breakthrough; we need it in 2015 - that is the date that has been set - so I think there needs to be a lot of focus now. Because when we are talking climate change, it is almost a proxy for saying our biodiversity is diminishing, we have problems with our oceans, our land quality is diminishing, our water quality is diminishing and our forest cover is dying. If we tackle climate, we actually tackle a very wide range of these huge issues on the environment.

Where do you see the role of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in promoting sustainable development?

The UNDP has been a leader on human development starting with the incredibly important thinking of Amartya Sen and collaborators on the human development paradigm a quarter of a century ago. Sustainable development is not as simple as just saying I will pay for children to go to school or I will pay for people to have their baby in the hospital. Actually there may be all sorts of factors why children aren't in school or women cannot access the health services or the death rate may be high for mothers because there are a lot of very young mothers.

We looked at this recently with the example of Ghana, which declared its maternal mortality rate a national emergency. And the higher rate of death is among 12-15 year-old girls - girls too young to be having babies. They should be having a childhood and adolescence and making some choice about their lives.

At the UNDP we embrace a rights-based approach to development. We believe in Millennium Development Goals with equity. We are not just interested in figures and averages, we want to know if progress is reaching every last person.

Helen Clark is the first woman to lead the United Nations Development Program, UNDP. She took over the reins in 2009. From 1999 to 2008 the Labour Party leader was prime minister of New Zealand - also the first woman to hold that position in the country.

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GLOBAL WARMING / CLIMATE CHANGE ISSUE (THRU CHANNELING)

7. Let us give you another prime example of duality, the controversial issue you call global warming. Those who believe this is a natural occurrence cite Earth’s ice ages as proof that humankind has no hand in today’s record temperatures, the melting of glaciers and the harsh climate anomalies. They believe that there is no need to change manufacturing operations or turn to alternative energy sources because doing so would be cost-prohibitive. Then there are those who believe that science proves climate change is manmade. They point to industrial pollution and the use of biofuels as the cause, and they maintain that unless action is taken to end those practices, the cost will be total destruction of the environment. With the two sides at loggerheads, no large scale efforts are underway to change business as usual.

8. The truth is, both sides have validity even though neither knows that Earth herself is in the process of restoring the moderate climate of Eden times, when her body was pristine and healthy. And pollution, a product of humanity, must stop because it is harming the planet and all of its life forms. Eventually the two sides of the global warming issue will realize that protecting and repairing the environment is essential, and formerly extreme views will be reconciled into effective methods to remedy the present critical state. Read more ..... (Q&A - November 2010 (Matthew Channeling))

"The Time Capsule of Gaia" – Feb 9, 2013 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Caroll) - (Text version)

“…  Tesla the Man

There was a point in time when humanity almost stumbled, by the way. You were having a hard time with electricity. So a man came along who was way ahead of his time and was available and his name was Nikola Tesla. He gave you a principle that today you call alternating current. Dear ones, I challenge you to understand this principle. Most of you can't, because it is not in 3D. The attributes are still considered "genius-level thinking" to this day. The whole idea of the kind of electricity you use today comes from this man's quantum mind.

That was all he was allowed to do. Tesla himself was a kind of time capsule, delivered at the right time. He had more, but alternating current was all that was allowed to be given to the planet at that time. Oh, he tried to give you more. He knew there were other things, but nothing was able to be developed. If I told you what else he had discovered, you might not be aware of it at all, since it was never allowed to get out of the box. Earth was not ready for it.

Tesla discovered massless objects. He could alter the mass of atomic structure using designer magnetics, but he never could control it. He had objects fly off his workbench and hit the ceiling, but he couldn't duplicate or control it. It just wasn't time yet. Do you know what else he was known for? It was seemingly the failure of the transmission of electricity. However, he didn't fail at all.

There are pictures of his tower, but every time a Human Being sees a tower, there is a biased assumption that something is going to be broadcast through the air. But in the case of Tesla, he had figured out how to broadcast electricity through the ground. You need towers for that because they have to pick up the magnetics within the ground in a certain way to broadcast them and then collect them again from the nodes of the planet's magnetic grid system. We talked about this before. He was utilizing the grid of the planet that is in the earth itself! He was on the edge of showing that you could use the whole grid of the planet magnetically to broadcast electricity and pick it up where you need it, safely, with no wires. But the earth was not ready for it.

Tesla died a broken man, filled with ideas that would have brought peace to planet Earth, but he was simply not allowed to give any of them to you.

Now I'll tell you why he was stopped, dear ones, and it's the first time we have ever told you – because these inventions were too easy to weaponize. Humanity just isn't ready for it. You're not ready for massless objects, either, for the principles are too easy to weaponize.

"So," you might say, "when will we be ready for it?" I think you already know the answer, don't you? At the time when Human consciousness reaches a point where that which is most important is unification and not separation, it will happen. A point where conquering and power are not desirable ideas or assets. A point where humanity will measure the strength of its population by how healthy they are and not by economic growth. A point where coming together with your neighbor is the main objective to social consciousness, and not conquering them or eliminating them. That's coming, dear ones. It's a ways away, but it's coming. Look around the planet at the moment. The old energy leaders are obvious, are they not? It's like they are relics in a world of thinking that is passing them by.  ….”