The UN Environment Programme’s report Navigating New Horizons is sub-titled “A global foresight report on planetary health and human wellbeing.”
In her foreword, executive director Inger Anderson notes: “The point of this report is not to predict the future [but] to foresee the future.”
The difference is important.
“Prediction is passive,” she notes, “it means locking in a vision of the future. Foresight is about imagining the future and then looking at how to change it.” So having identified eight critical shifts that threaten to disrupt planetary health and human well-being, the report turns to suggesting solutions.
“Humanity,” the report states, “has a stark and urgent choice to make: continue to destabilise planetary health and risk losing humanity’s life support system, or build a future that embraces equity, addresses the underlying drivers of environmental degradation and achieves sustainable development. What humanity decides now will shape the world that future generations will inherit.”
That latter point reflects one of the key changes the report calls for: We must adopt the principle of “intergenerational equity, which is concerned with generations not yet born.” This principle is embedded in the very definition of sustainable development, created in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
So we need to consider the needs of future generations in every policy and in every corporate decision we make. This is not a new idea; the report points to the concept of “seven generations” thinking, attributed to Native American and other Indigenous philosophies.
One practical way to do this has been demonstrated by the Welsh National Assembly. In 2015 they passed the Well-being of Future Generations Act. Among other things, the act establishes the position of future generations commissioner and establishes “a legally binding common purpose — the seven well-being goals — for national government, local government, local health boards and other specified public bodies.”
Under the act, these public bodies “must set and publish well-being objectives … then take action to make sure they meet the objectives they set.” Moreover, each government minister must set national indicators, establish and regularly update objectives, and publish an annual progress report.
The role of the commissioner is to “to act as a guardian for the interests of future generations in Wales,” and he or she can provide advice to public bodies on achieving goals, carry out research, conduct reviews of the work of the public bodies and make recommendations for action.
In addition, the commissioner must publish a report assessing what improvements public bodies should make to achieve their well-being goals a year before national assembly elections.
With a provincial election coming up Oct. 19, think how useful it would be to have such an act and report.
How would the B.C. government stack up? What would the report say about its commitment to expanding LNG exports and the associated greenhouse gas emissions? Its failure to fully implement the report of the Old Growth Strategic Review and fully protect old growth forests? Its failure to bring in a Species at Risk Act, as promised years ago?
Think how the presence of such an act might affect the election platforms of the parties. How could the Liberals (sorry, BC United) and the Conservatives put forward platforms essentially committed to “business as usual” when we know this leads to damage to both planetary health and the well-being of future generations?
But we don’t have such an act. It’s time we did. So if you share my concern with the direction we are headed, for the well-being of today’s young people in the decades ahead and for generations yet to come, I suggest you insist that all candidates and parties commit to bringing in a Well-being of Future Generations Act. Your children, grandchildren and their descendants will thank you for it.
Next week, I will look at two other key solutions the report recommends: a new social contract and a new global emphasis on well-being metrics.
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy
