The focus of government, media and public on the dangers of climate change is leaving other equally important environmental causes out in the cold.
That at least is the opinion of the RSPB's chief executive Graham Wynne. He said that resources and attention are now increasingly being shifted to tackling climate change, at the expense, so it would appear, of other pressing problems such as biodiversity.
Speaking at a debate organised by the Foreign Policy Centre, Graham Wynne said that NGOs like the RSPB found it much easier to get meetings with ministers if they used the phrase "climate change".
"It is as if a second front has opened up and the instant rush was 'lets move all of our resources to this second front - climate change'. The emphasis has shifted massively," Mr Wynne said.
"Unless we address environmental sustainability across the board and don't just get hung up on climate change, then the consequences are extremely dire."
He said Government environmental policies were incoherent and called for ministers to embed sustainability across all departments.
The problem, so says Green (Living) Review, is also that, while we must reduce our impact on the planet's limited resources, is that it might just be that climate change is nothing that we, mere humans, can actually tackle simple because there is a possibility, and more than a possibility even, that climate change is a natural cycle of the earth and that we may have to actually prepare for it and find ways of how to live with it. Mr Wynne so correctly pointed out that unless we address environmental sustainability across the board we end up in dire straights.
Too much emphasis is being laid on “tackling climate change” because, in the opinion of this journal, climate change, once referred to as “global warming” may not be something that we, as I said already, may have any control over and we humans may not actually cause. If we do not cause it nor have control over it we must, while doping all we can to, should it be man-made, which I doubt, stop it, do equally well all to ensure that we prepare to live with it and with the changed it is, inevitably, going to bring.
Gareth Thomas MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for International Development (DFID), argued that the interest in climate change could be harnessed to tackle other green issues and Government was already working to do this.
He said: "My sense is that we need to use the momentum and the political will that's beginning to develop to tackle climate change to tackle wider environmental degradation."
Increased use of incentives or green taxes, trade policies that promote sustainability, more joined-up thinking about environmental issues, and more effective international institutions to tackle environmental thinking could achieve this aim, Gareth Thomas said.
Richard Black, environment correspondent for BBC News, found the BBC's coverage of climate change in 2007 had swamped other interconnected environmental issues.
It is also that we at Green (Living) Review believe and we must return to a level playing field. Other issues are equally important, if not even more so.
By the end of October, more than 1,000 stories had been broadcast on climate change, compared to just four on desertification and four on deforestation.
Climate change also appears to be a kind of scare story for we do not have the faintest idea as to whether it is actually real. If it is,which is possible, for it would appear that the Earth goes through such cycles every thousand or so years, then it is a natural earth cycle and we have no chance but to learn to live with it and then other issues, such as deforestation, waste, overuse of motor vehicles, etc. are even more important to tackle.
© Michael Smith (Veshengro), March 2008
Climate change 'diverts resources' from other green issues
