An economic case for protecting the planet

Naoko Ishii
at
TEDGlobal>NYC
267,588 views • 14:14
https://www.ted.com/talks/naoko_ishii_an_economic_case_for_saving_the_planet/transcript?utm_source=newsletter_daily&ut
m_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=image__2018-01-22

00:13
Good evening, everyone.

00:16
I am from Japan, so I'd like to start with a story about Japanese fishing villages. In the past, every
fisherman was tempted to catch as many as fish as possible, but if everybody did that, the fish,
common shared resource in the community, would disappear. The result would be hardship and
poverty for everyone. This happened in some cases,but it did not happen in other cases. In these
communities, the fishermen developed a kind of social contract that told each one of them to hold
back a bit to prevent overfishing. The fisherman would keep an eye on each other.There would be a
penalty if you were caught cheating. But once the benefit of a social contract became clear to
everyone, the incentive to cheat dramatically dropped.

01:30
We find the same story around the world. This is how villagers in medieval Europe managed pasture
and forests. This is how communities in Asia managed water, and this is how indigenous peoples in
the Amazon managed wildlife.These communities realized they relied on a finite, shared
resource. They developed rules and practices on how to manage those resources, and they changed
their behavior so that they could continue to rely on those shared resources tomorrow by not
overfishing, not overgrazing, not polluting or depleting water streams today.

02:26
This is a story of the commons, and also how to avoid the so-called tragedy of the commons. But this
is also a story of an economy that was mainly local, where everybody had a very strong sense of
belonging.

02:48
Our economies are no longer local. When we moved away from being local, we started to lose our
connection to the commons. We carried economic objectives, goals and systems beyond the
local, but we did not carry the notion of taking care of the commons.

03:13
So our oceans, forests, once very close to us as our local commons, moved very far away from
us. So today, we pump millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the air, we dump plastics, fertilizers
and industrial waste into the rivers and oceans, and we cut down forests that absorb CO2. We make
the wild biodiversity much more fragile. We seem to have totally forgotten that there is such a thing as
global commons: air, water, forests and biodiversity.

04:05
Now, it is modern science that reminds us how vital the global commons are. In 2009, a group of
scientists proposedhow to assess the health of the global commons. They defined nine planetary
boundaries vital to our survival, then they measured how far we could go before we cross over the
tipping points or thresholds that would lead us to the irreversible or even catastrophic change.

04:45
This is where we were in the 1950s. We broadly remained within safe operating space, marked by the
green line. But look at where we are now. We have crossed four of those boundaries, and we will be
crossing others in the future.

05:13
How did we end up in this situation? Well, my personal story may tell us something. Five years ago, I
was appointedas CEO of the GEF, Global Environment Facility, but I am not a conservationist or an
environmental activist. I am an economist, and for the last 30 years, I had worked for public finance in
my home country and around the world. I can tell you one thing for sure: during these 30 years, the
notion of the global commons never crossed my mind. I didn't have a single conversation about the
global commons with my colleagues. This tells me that the notion of the global commons was not
really entering into the big money decisions like state budgets or investment plans.

06:18
And I'm wondering, why do we have this sheer ignorance about the global commons, including me,
myself? One possible explanation might be that until recently, it didn't really matter too much. Even if
we mess up some part of the environment, we were not fundamentally changing the functions of the
earth system. The global commons had still enough capacity to take the punches we gave them. In
fact, the fish were still plentiful, the fields for grazing were still vast. Our mistake was to assume that
the capacity of the earth for self-repair had no limits. It does have limits. The message from the
science is very clear: we humans have become an overwhelming force to determine the future living
conditions on earth, and what's more, we are running out of time. If we don't act on them, we will be
losing the global commons. It's only our generation who are able to preserve it -- preserve the
commons as we know them.Now is the time we start managing the global commons as our parents or
our grandparents managed their local commons.

07:56
The first thing we need to do is to simply recognize that we do have the global commons and they are
very, very important. Then we need to build the stewardship of the global commons into all of our
thinking, our business, our economy, our policy-making -- in all of our actions. We need to recreate
the social contract of the fishing villages on the global scale.

08:31
But what does it mean in practice? Where to start with? I see there are four key economic
systems that fundamentally need to change. First, we need to change our cities. By 2050, two thirds
of our population will live in cities. We need green cities. Second, we need to change our energy
system. The world economy must sharply decarbonize, essentially in one generation. Third, we need
to change our production-consumption system. We need to break away from current take-make-
waste consumption patterns. And finally, we need to change our food system,what to eat and how to
produce it. And all of those four systems are putting enormous pressure on the global commons, and
it's also very difficult to flip them. They are extremely complex, with many decision-makers, actors
involved.

09:45
Let's take the example of the food system. Food production is currently responsible for one quarter of
greenhouse gas emissions. It is also a main user of the world's water resources. In fact, 70 percent of
today's water is used to grow crops. Vast areas of tropical forest are used for agriculture. This
deforestation drives extinction. In fact, we are losing species 1,000 times faster than the natural
rate. And on top of all of that bad news, one third of food produced today globally is not eaten. It's
wasted.

10:39
But there is the good news, good signs. Coalitions of stakeholders are now coming together to try to
transform the food system with one shared goal: how to produce enough healthy food for everyone, at
the same time, to try to cut, to sharply reduce, the footprint from the food system on the global
commons.
11:10
I had an opportunity to fly over the Indonesian island of Sumatra, and I saw with my own eyes the
massive deforestation to make room for palm oil plantations. By the way, palm oil is included in
thousands of food productswe eat every day. The global demand for palm oil is just increasing. In
Sumatra, I met smallholder farmers who need to make a day-to-day living from growing oil palm. I met
global food companies, financial institutions and local government officials. All of them told me that
they can't make the change by themselves, and only by working together under a kind of new
contract, or a new practice, do they have a chance to protect tropical forests. So it's so encouraging to
see, at least for the last few years, this new coalition among these committed actors along the supply
chain come together to try to transform the food system. In fact, what they are trying to do is to create
a new kind of social contract to manage the global commons.

12:41
All changes start at home, at your place and at my place. At GEF, Global Environment Facility, we
have now a new strategy, and we put the global commons at its center. I hope we won't be the only
ones. If everybody stays on the sidelines, waiting for others to step in, the global commons will
continue to deteriorate, and everybody will be much worse off. We need to save ourselves from the
tragedy of the commons.

13:24
So, I invite all of you to embrace the global commons. Please do remember that global commons do
exist and are waiting for your stewardship.

13:38
We all share one planet in common. We breathe the same air, we drink the same water, we depend
on the same oceans, forests, and biodiversity. There is no space left on earth for egoism. The global
commons must be kept within their safe operating space, and we can only do it together.

14:07
Thank you so much.
How to put the power of law in people's
hands
Vivek Maru
at
TEDGlobal 2017
560,544 views • 19:43

00:12
I want to tell you about someone. I'm going to call him Ravi Nanda. I'm changing his name to protect his safety.

00:20
Ravi's from a community of herdspeople in Gujarat on the western coast of India, same place my own family comes
from. When he was 10 years old, his entire community was forced to move because a multinational corporationconstructed a
manufacturing facility on the land where they lived. Then, 20 years later, the same company built a cement factory 100 meters
from where they live now. India has got strong environmental regulations on paper, but this company has violated many of
them. Dust from that factory covers Ravi's mustache and everything he wears. I spent just two days in his place, and I coughed
for a week. Ravi says that if people or animals eat anything that grows in his village or drink the water, they get sick. He says
children now walk long distances with cattle and buffaloto find uncontaminated grazing land. He says many of those kids have
dropped out of school, including three of his own.

01:34
Ravi has appealed to the company for years. He said, "I've written so many letters my family could cremate me with them. They
wouldn't need to buy any wood."

01:44
(Laughter)

01:47
He said the company ignored every one of those letters, and so in 2013, Ravi Nanda decided to use the last means of
protest he thought he had left. He walked to the gates of that factory with a bucket of petrol in his hands, intending to set
himself on fire.

02:10
Ravi is not alone in his desperation. The UN estimates that worldwide, four billion people live without basic access to
justice. These people face grave threats to their safety, their livelihoods, their dignity. There are almost always laws on the
books that would protect these people, but they've often never heard of those laws, and the systems that are supposed to
enforce those laws are corrupt or broken or both.

02:45
We are living with a global epidemic of injustice, but we've been choosing to ignore it. Right now, in Sierra Leone, in Cambodia,
in Ethiopia, farmers are being cajoled into putting their thumbprints on 50-year lease agreements, signing away all the land
they've ever known for a pittance without anybody even explaining the terms. Governments seem to think that's OK. Right now,
in the United States, in India, in Slovenia, people like Ravi are raising their children in the shadow of factories or mines that are
poisoning their air and their water. There are environmental laws that would protect these people, but many have never seen
those laws, let alone having a shot at enforcing them. And the world seems to have decided that's OK.

03:45
What would it take to change that? Law is supposed to be the language we use to translate our dreams about justiceinto living
institutions that hold us together. Law is supposed to be the difference between a society ruled by the most powerful and one
that honors the dignity of everyone, strong or weak.

04:09
That's why I told my grandmother 20 years ago that I wanted to go to law school. Grandma didn't pause. She didn't skip a
beat. She said to me, "Lawyer is liar."

04:20
(Laughter)
04:23
That was discouraging.

04:25
(Laughter)

04:29
But grandma's right, in a way. Something about law and lawyers has gone wrong. We lawyers are usually expensive, first of
all, and we tend to focus on formal court channels that are impractical for many of the problems people face.Worse, our
profession has shrouded law in a cloak of complexity. Law is like riot gear on a police officer. It's intimidating and
impenetrable, and it's hard to tell there's something human underneath.

05:02
If we're going to make justice a reality for everyone, we need to turn law from an abstraction or a threat into something that
every single person can understand, use and shape. Lawyers are crucial in that fight, no doubt, but we can't leave it to lawyers
alone. In health care, for example, we don't just rely on doctors to serve patients. We have nurses and midwives and
community health workers. The same should be true of justice. Community legal workers, sometimes we call them community
paralegals, or barefoot lawyers, can be a bridge. These paralegals are from the communities they serve. They demystify
law, break it down into simple terms, and then they help people look for a solution. They don't focus on the courts alone. They
look everywhere: ministry departments, local government, an ombudsman's office. Lawyers sometimes say to their clients, "I'll
handle it for you. I've got you."Paralegals have a different message, not "I'm going to solve it for you," but "We're going to solve
it together, and in the process, we're both going to grow."

06:23
Community paralegals saved my own relationship to law. After about a year in law school, I almost dropped out. I was thinking
maybe I should have listened to my grandmother. It was when I started working with paralegals in Sierra Leone, in 2003, that I
began feeling hopeful about the law again, and I have been obsessed ever since.

06:46
Let me come back to Ravi. 2013, he did reach the gates of that factory with the bucket of petrol in his hands, but he was
arrested before he could follow through. He didn't have to spend long in jail, but he felt completely defeated.

07:05
Then, two years later, he met someone. I'm going to call him Kush. Kush is part of a team of community paralegalsthat works
for environmental justice on the Gujarat coast. Kush explained to Ravi that there was law on his side. Kush translated into
Gujarati something Ravi had never seen. It's called the "consent to operate." It's issued by the state government, and it allows
the factory to run only if it complies with specific conditions. So together, they compared the legal requirements with reality, they
collected evidence, and they drafted an application -- not to the courts, but to two administrative institutions, the Pollution
Control Board and the district administration. Those applications started turning the creaky wheels of enforcement. A pollution
officer came for a site inspection, and after that, the company started running an air filtration system it was supposed to have
been using all along. It also started covering the 100 trucks that come and go from that plant every day. Those two measures
reduced the air pollution considerably. The case is far from over, but learning and using law gave Ravi hope.

08:30
There are people like Kush walking alongside people like Ravi in many places. Today, I work with a group called
Namati. Namati helps convene a global network dedicated to legal empowerment. All together, we are over a thousand
organizations in 120 countries. Collectively, we deploy tens of thousands of community paralegals.

08:55
Let me give you another example. This is Khadija Hamsa. She is one of five million people in Kenya who faces a discriminatory
vetting process when trying to obtain a national ID card. It is like the Jim Crow South in the United States. If you are from a
certain set of tribes, most of them Muslim, you get sent to a different line. Without an ID, you can't apply for a job. You can't get
a bank loan. You can't enroll in university. You are excluded from society. Khadija tried off and on to get an ID for eight years,
without success. Then she met a paralegal working in her communitynamed Hassan Kassim. Hassan explained to Khadija how
vetting works, he helped her gather the documents she needed, helped prep her to go before the vetting committee. Finally,
she was able to get an ID with Hassan's help.First thing she did with it was use it to apply for birth certificates for her
children, which they need in order to go to school.

10:05
In the United States, among many other problems, we have a housing crisis. In many cities, 90 percent of the landlords in
housing court have attorneys, while 90 percent of the tenants do not. In New York, a new crew of paralegals -- they're called
Access to Justice Navigators -- helps people to understand housing law and to advocate for themselves. Normally in New
York, one out of nine tenants brought to housing court gets evicted. Researchers took a look at 150 cases in which people had
help from these paralegals, and they found no evictions at all, not one.A little bit of legal empowerment can go a long way.

10:53
I see the beginnings of a real movement, but we're nowhere near what's necessary. Not yet. In most countries around the
world, governments do not provide a single dollar of support to paralegals like Hassan and Kush. Most governments don't even
recognize the role paralegals play, or protect paralegals from harm. I also don't want to give you the impression that paralegals
and their clients win every time. Not at all. That cement factory behind Ravi's village, it's been turning off the filtration system at
night, when it's least likely that the company would get caught.Running that filter costs money. Ravi WhatsApps photos of the
polluted night sky. This is one he sent to Kush in May.Ravi says the air is still unbreathable. At one point this year, Ravi went on
hunger strike. Kush was frustrated. He said, "We can win if we use the law." Ravi said, "I believe in the law, I do, but it's not
getting us far enough."

12:02
Whether it's India, Kenya, the United States or anywhere else, trying to squeeze justice out of broken systems is like Ravi's
case. Hope and despair are neck and neck. And so not only do we urgently need to support and protect the work of barefoot
lawyers around the world, we need to change the systems themselves. Every case a paralegal takes on is a story about how a
system is working in practice. When you put those stories together, it gives you a detailed portrait of the system as a
whole. People can use that information to demand improvements to laws and policies. In India, paralegals and clients have
drawn on their case experience to propose smarter regulations for the handling of minerals. In Kenya, paralegals and clients
are using data from thousands of cases to argue that vetting is unconstitutional.

13:07
This is a different way of approaching reform. This is not a consultant flying into Myanmar with a template he's going to cut and
paste from Macedonia, and this is not an angry tweet. This is about growing reforms from the experience of ordinary
people trying to make the rules and systems work. This transformation in the relationship between people and law is the right
thing to do. It's also essential for overcoming all of the other great challenges of our times. We are not going to avert
environmental collapse if the people most affected by pollution don't have a say in what happens to the land and the water, and
we won't succeed in reducing poverty or expanding opportunity if poor people can't exercise their basic rights. And I believe we
won't overcome the despair that authoritarian politicians prey upon if our systems stay rigged.

14:20
I called Ravi before coming here to ask permission to share his story. I asked if there was any message he wanted to give
people. He said, "[Gujarati]." Wake up. "[Gujarati]." Don't be afraid. "[Gujarati]." Fight with paper. By that I think he means fight
using law rather than guns. "[Gujarati]." Maybe not today, maybe not this year, maybe not in five years, but find justice.

15:03
If this guy, whose entire community is being poisoned every single day, who was ready to take his own life -- if he's not giving
up on seeking justice, then the world can't give up either. Ultimately, what Ravi calls "fighting with paper" is about forging a
deeper version of democracy in which we the people, we don't just cast ballots every few years, we take part daily in the rules
and institutions that hold us together, in which everyone, even the least powerful, can know law, use law and shape
law. Making that happen, winning that fight, requires all of us.

15:50
Thank you guys. Thank you.

15:51
(Applause)

16:00
Kelo Kubu: Thanks, Vivek. So I'm going to make a few assumptions that people in this room know what the Sustainable
Development Goals are and how the process works, but I want us to talk a little bit about Goal 16: Peace, justice and strong
institutions.

16:20
Vivek Maru: Yeah. Anybody remember the Millennium Development Goals? They were adopted in 2000 by the UN and
governments around the world, and they were for essential, laudable things. It was reduce child mortality by two thirds, cut
hunger in half, crucial things. But there was no mention of justice or fairness or accountability or corruption, and we have made
progress during the 15 years when those goals were in effect, but we are way behind what justice demands, and we're not
going to get there unless we take justice into account. And so when the debate started about the next development
framework, the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, our community came together around the world to argue that access to
justice and legal empowerment should be a part of that new framework. And there was a lot of resistance. Those things are
more political, more contentious than the other ones,so we didn't know until the night before whether it was going to come
through. We squeaked by. The 16th out of 17 goals commits to access to justice for all, which is a big deal. It's a big deal, yes.
Let's clap for justice.

17:27
(Applause)

17:29
Here's the scandal, though. The day the goals were adopted, most of them were accompanied by big commitments:a billion
dollars from the Gates Foundation and the British government for nutrition; 25 billion in public-private financing for health care
for women and children. On access to justice, we had the words on the paper, but nobody pledged a penny, and so that is the
opportunity and the challenge that we face right now. The world recognizes more than ever before that you can't have
development without justice, that people can't improve their lives if they can't exercise their rights, and what we need to do now
is turn that rhetoric, turn that principle, into reality.

18:12
(Applause)

18:17
KK: How can we help? What can people in this room do?

18:20
VM: Great question. Thank you for asking. I would say three things. One is invest. If you have 10 dollars, or a hundred dollars,
a million dollars, consider putting some of it towards grassroots legal empowerment. It's important in its own right and it's crucial
for just about everything else we care about.

18:38
Number two, push your politicians and your governments to make this a public priority. Just like health or education, access to
justice should be one of the things that a government owes its people, and we're nowhere close to that,neither in rich countries
or poor countries. Number three is: be a paralegal in your own life. Find an injustice or a problem where you live. It's not hard to
find, if you look. Is the river being contaminated, the one that passes through the city where you live? Are there workers getting
paid less than minimum wage or who are working without safety gear? Get to know the people most affected, find out what the
rules say, see if you can use those rules to get a solution. If it doesn't work, see if you can come together to improve those
rules. Because if we all start knowing law, using law and shaping law, then we will be building that deeper version of
democracy that I believe our world desperately needs.

19:38
(Applause)

19:39
KK: Thanks so much, Vivek. VM: Thank you.