The climate change crisis has captured the imagination, but the world is at a confluence of crises with the other two - biodiversity, and oceans.
Singapore’s ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh said in the latest episode of The Straits Times’ Green Pulse Podcast, that the international community has not been good stewards of the oceans. The professor of law at the National University of Singapore (NUS) is also one of the world’s senior most international environmental diplomats.
The veteran diplomat, now 86, has serious warnings for the international community over the acidification, pollution and overfishing of oceans; as well as the depletion of biodiversity - with the latter severe enough for some scientists to say that the world is living through a sixth ‘great extinction’.
Few have had such global perspective and insight into complex issues like Prof Koh. He chaired the main committee at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit and the confabulations that produced the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) - both pivotal in global environmental law.
Efforts to curb global warming, as well as protect biodiversity and oceans, are not encouraging, as Prof Koh told this journalist and show host Nirmal Ghosh.
“We have not been good stewards of the world’s fisheries”, Prof Koh said, citing Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) findings that about 90 per cent of major fisheries have been depleted.
He declared: “We’ve been overfishing. We’ve used unsustainable practices... and we have to do something about this.”
He added though, that there is hope the target of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is still possible, and a tipping point may have been reached in terms of understanding the loss of biodiversity.
There is also hope in ongoing negotiations on an agreement on plastics.
But he warned there is also a risk that geopolitical competition and wars may distract from these larger, existential environmental threats.
It’s a question of mindshare, as Prof Koh explained in Green Pulse. Most global leaders’ minds are focused on the Russia-Ukraine war and the war in Gaza, with the danger that achievements of the recent past - in climate change, biodiversity, or the oceans - may find themselves in retreat.
Humans must also stop making war on nature, added Prof Koh, who recently co-edited a volume of essays on the environment titled “Peace with Nature.”
He said: “Humans are part of the natural world. We cannot live apart from nature. We are part of nature.
“If we don’t take care of the biodiversity and the natural functioning of the ecosystem, this will ultimately affect our health and our well being.”
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Produced by: Nirmal Ghosh (nirmal@sph.com.sg), Ernest Luis, Fa’izah Sani and Hadyu Rahim
Edited by: Hadyu Rahim
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