• by Maurice Strong
• Monday, July 06, 2009
• Inter Press Service

A recent study by the Global Humanitarian Forum, headed by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, postulates that the economic and human costs of climate change could now amount to some 125 billion dollars per year and the loss of 300,000 lives, writes Maurice Strong, who was the Secretary General of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, first Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment.

Redeployment of the massive resources, financial and human now devoted to the military could itself meet most of the need ­in effect giving priority to improving living power rather than killing power. If the figure of trillion dollars and beyond seems unrealistically under today’s conditions, we must be reminded that it is only a portion of what the United States alone has spent in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in current attempts to bailout its major financial institutions and revive its flagging economy. The climate change crisis is in even greater need of a bailout than the economic and financial crisis, though both are inextricably related.

(*) Maurice Strong was the Secretary General of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, first Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment ( http://www.mauricestrong.net).

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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