Document(s) 5 of 11

1. PREVENTING DEADLY CONFLICT 

It is true to say, but only half-true, that most wars today are civil wars. They are fought against civilians for the most part, and it is mostly civilians who die. In cause and effect, however, it is truer to say that deadly conflict has been globalized. No war, no matter how local, can be fully understood (or prevented) without looking to the local impact of global markets, the global arms trade, the transborder loyalties of kinship and tradition, the fears and interests of other people and governments, and the growing influences of nonstate participants (whether mercenaries or Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International or Alcoa). And just as television communicates the wickedness of war to a global audience, norms of human rights and good governance acquire a new and global authority. 

No government, not even the most powerful, can any longer and by itself protect the security of its people. The only policy of national security is a policy of international security. Nor can any government defend the claim that whatever happens on its territory is nobody else's concern. That claim is denied by the UN Charter itself, and by an imposing number of treaties signed since (see Box 1). Deadly conflict, like the gross abuse of human rights that so often foretells conflict, has become everybody's business. 
 
 

BOX 1 International Instruments for Human Rights Twenty-five international instruments, adopted by the United Nations, protect and promote human rights around the world:  Slavery Convention of 1926 (1926)  Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948)  Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (1949)  Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951)  Convention on the Political Rights of Women (1952)  1953 Protocol Amending the Slavery Convention of 1926 (1953)  Slavery Convention of 1926 as amended (1953)  Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (1954)  Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (1956)  Convention on the Nationality of Married Women (1957)  Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (1961)  Convention on the Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages (1962)  International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965)  International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966)  International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966)  Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966)  Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (1967)  Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity (1968)  International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973)  Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979)  Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984)  International Convention against Apartheid in Sports (1985)  Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989)  Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (aims at the abolition of the death penalty) (1989)  Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and the Members of their Families (1990)

As the line between foreign and domestic begins to lose usefulness, so too do the old distinctions between intrastate war, interstate war, and the nonstate violence of terrorism. Insurgencies cross borders, as refugees do. Terrorists take the pay and protection of states. Government soldiers fight like criminals. Criminals do the dirty work of governments. To the innocent victims, the wrongs committed are practically indistinguishable. And to the world, they are just as menacing. 

If globalization tends to make conflict more lethal to more people in more countries, it also intensifies the urgency of prevention. And just as the causes and effects of deadly conflict are rarely contained in the territory of a single state, so must the prevention of conflict be a collaborative enterprise. Nobody can do it alone, but nobody can evade the obligation of doing it together. 

Embedded though conflict usually is in the schisms and memories of conflict-prone societies, deadly conflict is not inevitable. On the contrary, war and other forms of organized violence usually follow considered decisions and intentional actions. Neither the genocide in Rwanda, nor the homicidal atrocities by government forces in Kosovo, nor the contemptible destruction in East Timor were spontaneous or natural or unavoidable. They were planned, decided, and done. Such things can be prevented. 

But how? Lasting prevention means altering the conditions that give rise to violence. This is the long work of structural prevention: building peace by building good government, meeting basic human needs, and fostering social harmony. In this report, we focus on other measures: quickly achievable reforms of governance. 

Plainly, existing institutions of governance have not adapted to the prevention of deadly conflict in the global age. The ghastly evidence lies all around us: in the graveyards of the Balkans, in the unspeakable wounds of children in Sierra Leone, in the narco-ruins of life in Colombia. In Cambodia, piles of skulls serve as war memorials. In Russia, Chechen lives have been blasted away and mothers weep at children's funerals. 

Television, the Internet, the travels of relatives, the networks of NGOs -- all serve to bring these conflicts home to us. They become, at least in some cases, our conflicts. And here globalization is having a powerful and complicating effect: globalized norms of human rights and democratic governance penetrate borders, reshaping old concepts of sovereignty and autonomy. People now see grotesque abuses of human rights on television; organize themselves in transborder NGOs; and experience and begin to understand linkages between corporate conduct, economic justice, individual security, democracy, and good government. A norm has formed and still develops -- fitfully, with false starts and second thoughts ­ that legitimizes international intervention to stop the worst offences against human security and human rights. And, in the process, the meaning of national interest is being redefined. Sovereignty is rewired, and we see more clearly that what happens beyond our borders affects our own well-being and commands cooperative action. 

The norm of intervention does not set up any absolute rule. It is one norm among many that guide the behaviour of governments and others in the global community. It coexists, restlessly and sometimes uneasily, with norms attached to sovereignty and the inviolability of borders. But nothing in the norms of sovereignty denies the reality of human rights, or the legitimacy of defending and restoring those rights. 

As norms and rules are realigned to cope with new conditions, confusion reigns. But in all this uncertainty, the norm of intervention must not be traduced by the powerful (or the ambitious) as a pretext for interference in the affairs of the weak. As Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika declared in the 1999 General Assembly: "Sovereignty is our final defence against the rules of an unequal world." This is a crucial element of the intervention norm: to have good and lasting effect, any act of intervention in the end must carry legitimacy. It is otherwise mere lawlessness. Small countries understand this acutely. So should any people whose prosperity and security are best served by maintaining an orderly peace in the world. Legitimacy is what the UN's authority pre-eminently provides to any exercise of military intervention. 

In the worrying and commonly cited case of Kosovo, the NATO allies launched their bombardment of Yugoslavia without the authority of Security Council approval. Many have held, and argue still, that the NATO action was both illegal in international law and illegitimate. The US government and its allies answer that the vicious abuses of life and liberty committed by the Milosevic regime justified the armed intervention (a lesser evil to stop the greater evil of ethnic cleansing, as it might be framed in just-war theory). What the NATO governments also emphasize is that the legitimizing approval of the Security Council was blocked by the (illegitimate?) threat of veto by Russia and China. 

This makes a second point: just as an intervention decision must be legitimate to be fully effective, it must also be effective to be fully legitimate. When the Security Council declines to enforce its resolutions, or is indecisive, deadlocked by the veto, or careless of its obligations to peace and security, it will be condemned as ineffective by the rest of the world community. Similarly, it will be dismissed as ineffective when it refuses arbitrarily to intervene in some crises but intervenes in like crises elsewhere. When the Security Council lacks effectiveness, it loses legitimacy. The Kosovo case remains so disturbing because neither NATO's action nor the Security Council's inaction carried the legitimacy that intervention decisions require. 

Early warning of deadly conflict is vital to effectiveness. The common and sinister sign of impending trouble is the abuse of human rights -- committed by governments or tolerated by them (Box 2). Promptly detected, these are the wrongs that demand quick international action, before a larger tragedy follows. 
 

BOX 2 Indicators of States at Risk  The indicators below have been cited as particularly relevant to the identification of states that may be in danger of collapse. It is true that nearly every country in the world might have at least one of these characteristics. Yet, a critical mass of symptoms could very well serve as a credible warning signal of developing problems.  Demographic pressures: high infant mortality, rapid changes in population, including massive refugee movements, high population density, youth bulge, insufficient food or access to safe water, ethnic groups sharing land, territory (i.e., groups' attachment to land), environment (i.e., the relationship between ethnic groups and their physical settings)  A lack of democratic practices: criminalization or delegitimization of the state, or human rights violations  Regimes of short duration  Ethnic composition of the ruling elite differing from the population at large  Deterioration or elimination of the public service  Sharp and severe economic distress: uneven economic development along ethnic lines and a lack of trade openness  A legacy of vengeance-seeking group grievance  Massive, chronic, or sustained human flight

But once the warning is heard, the effectiveness needs to be predictable. As Secretary-General Kofi Annan remarked in his 1999 annual report on the work of the UN: "Even the most repressive leaders watch to see what they can get away with. ... The more the international community succeeds in altering their destructive calculus, the more lives can be saved." A high level of certainty that the Security Council will intervene -- with the durable international support that legitimacy provides -- can deter some of the worst excesses of dictators and aggressors. For this reason, small countries vulnerable to various forms of mischief would benefit most from a stronger and more disciplined exercise of the norm of intervention, intervention that is both effective and legitimate. 

This means that the global community cannot relegate the use of force to the option of last resort. Effective prevention, and particularly deterrence, require a readiness to use force when it will do the most good, not just when it is least inconvenient or politically inescapable. It is too soon for final judgments on the case of East Timor, but we venture this proposition: it is generally a mistake to try to decide a deep-seated dispute of this kind by referendum or plebiscite in the first instance. The very holding of the vote sets up a zero-sum confrontation between total loss and total victory, inciting violence from those who expect to lose. Better to create conditions of at least minimal security (and even, with good fortune, a civil dialogue) and later -- in relative serenity, with power-sharing and other formulations to ponder -- arrange an election on the future. In such cases, an armed international presence should be one of the first resorts, not the last, to prevent conflict and advance a democratic settlement. In East Timor, had Indonesian authorities permitted it, tragedy might have been prevented by a sufficient deployment of force earlier rather than later in the ballot process. 

Just as early warning is crucial to prevention and successful intervention, so is careful and patient follow-up. This is not to argue that every mission needs a precisely scheduled exit strategy (even if that's what generals want). What is always necessary, however, is an agreed understanding of realizable objectives and a shared determination to achieve them. That will include preparation of the critical transition from military to civilian administration in most cases, and investments in subsequent political and economic development. These are long-term (and sometimes costly) commitments, typically hard to negotiate. But interventions lacking these undertakings will very likely lack both effectiveness and legitimacy. 

In the Security Council itself, the effectiveness and legitimacy of its proceedings would be immeasurably enhanced by a curtailment of the veto and expansion of membership. We propose neither here. Such reforms mean changing the Charter. There is no consensus on such amendments and regrettably little will to 
create a consensus. 

Still the facts remain. Overuse of the veto robs the Council and its permanent members of both effectiveness and legitimacy. And as for the Council's anachronistic membership, it is an injustice and an impediment to success. It does not represent the people of the world, or even the current politics of interstate relations. There has developed, moreover, a malign interaction of veto and inequitable membership, in the form of secret meetings of the Permanent Five from which the other ten Council members are methodically excluded. Again, effectiveness and legitimacy are lost, and the incongruity of membership and procedures grows more destabilizing by the day. 

Speaking of lost legitimacy, it is impossible not to be reminded that the largest dealers in the global arms market every year include the Council's Permanent Five: Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States. Those governments ought to be asked more often how they reconcile peace, security, and human well-being with selling death. 

Meanwhile, however, reform can occur without Charter amendments. The Secretary-General, the Assembly, and the Council have already made praiseworthy progress; much more is possible. Abuse of the veto, for instance, could be usefully reduced by an informal but explicit agreement among the Permanent Five on three simple rules. First, each of the Five should declare as policy that it will not impose or threaten a veto on any question that is purely procedural. Second, on substantive questions, each should declare that it will apply its veto only against resolutions directly and significantly threatening its own vital interests. And third, every exercise of the veto should be accompanied by a (convincing) public statement to justify it. Such a three-part reform is not far-fetched. In truth, the United States for many years forswore its use of the veto unilaterally. It might productively do so again: a self-imposed commitment to our three suggested rules will tend to encourage or embarrass others to announce likewise. At a stroke, it would also regain for the US government a standing in the UN corresponding more closely to its standing in the world. (Although its reputation will never fully recover, nor should it, until the United States reliably pays its UN debts in full and without conditions.) Below, we propose six more recommendations for the better prevention of deadly conflict. 

When the Secretary-General finds after an investigation that serious human-rights abuses are or may be occurring, to which the Security Council is not already responding, he should refer his finding to the General Assembly. 
We believe that if a sizeable and representative Assembly majority concluded in a resolution that such violations were taking place, it would prove much harder politically for a permanent Council member to veto remedial action. The Assembly's freedom to act in such cases is constrained only by the Charter's prohibition (in Article 12) against the Assembly making a "recommendation" in respect of an issue on which the Council is already "exercising ... the functions assigned to it" by the Charter. In short, the Assembly is entitled to address a problem that the Council is avoiding. And it should be recalled that the Assembly in the past has acted resolutely in such matters; among other operations, the United Nations Emergency Force in 1956 (the first true peacekeeping deployment to the Middle East) was established by the Assembly. Without changing the Charter, the Assembly could change the politics of Security Council decision-making, rendering the veto far less easy to threaten or deploy without persuasive justification. 

The Secretary-General, with others, should strengthen the apparatus of conflict warning. 

Violations of human rights -- themselves often violent -- commonly precede deadly conflict. They can give early warning, and time for prevention. The Secretary-General has tightened and streamlined coordination among UN agencies in the field and at headquarters. Those efforts, and outreach to NGO, business, and academic communities, should be systematically intensified. NGOs and UN agencies are frequently the first to witness the injustices and imminent dangers that abuses represent. And after conflict does erupt, they can supply valuable intelligence to guide helpful intervention, whether as aid or sanctions, diplomacy or armed force. To the same end, the Secretary-General should activate more frequently Article 99 of the Charter -- the open authority of his office to "bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security." 

To enhance the Secretary-General's capacity to detect and resolve incipient crises, UN member states should contribute significantly to the Fund for Preventive Action. 
The Fund, established by Norway in 1996, can become an important resource for the Secretary-General to train, support, and expand a roster of people to serve as envoys and special representatives in real or apprehended crises. It is a familiar but easily neglected fact that quiet diplomacy, well timed, can prevent deadly conflict or its spread. It is money well spent, but it is money that member states spend too little of. In every case, early prevention is far cheaper than the cost of later armed intervention and postconflict reconstruction. 

The Secretary-General and Security Council must have more capacity for rapid reaction to imminent conflict.
The carnage in East Timor, much of which occurred while the Council and member states laboriously assembled an intervention force, demonstrated again the necessity of timely deployment. Various member governments have made useful proposals for rapid-reaction and standby forces on call for UN duty. Existing primitive arrangements need improving. The designation of rapid-reaction forces by member states would hasten deployments by "coalitions of the willing" in emergencies (and reduce reliance on superpower contributions). It would also facilitate participation in UN-authorized missions by smaller and middle powers otherwise unable to field large forces at short notice. Capacity would be further enhanced by the creation of a small standing police force, at the call of the Secretary-General and the Council. Police are invariably harder to get from member states even than troops (because police are never in over-supply domestically); yet the inexpensive deployment of police on short notice can subdue an imminent crisis and bring a reassuring peace to the aftermath. 

Far more political and organizational energy must be invested in the safe management, and reduction, of nuclear arsenals. 
Any use of nuclear weapons would be catastrophic. For exactly that reason, nuclear weapons are militarily useless as instruments of state power. They remain, however, a menace to the world, not least as weapons of terror. Which is why, given the sorry improbability of early and complete nuclear disarmament, there is an urgent need for a better accounting of weapons and materials, with a closer monitoring of their whereabouts and condition. The real and immediate problems are these: to re-establish dependable control over the former Soviet warheads; to reduce the numbers of Russian and US warhead-delivery vehicles; to take more nuclear forces off alert; to explore the stabilizing effects of reciprocal no-first-use commitments; and to prevent proliferation to potential rogue states and others. Yet the various regimes intended to limit the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and discourage their use, have fallen into an alarming disarray. The US Senate's repudiation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the unsettling prospect that the United States will try to deploy missile-defence systems, only aggravate the dangers of future weapons races and a new proliferation. 

Even now, despite the initiatives of nuclear arms reduction already completed, an appalling number of warheads remain around the world -- a condition made more dangerous by the deplorable activities of India and Pakistan. To believe so many weapons can be kept indefinitely and never used is fanciful optimism. The risks of inadvertence, misperception, miscalculation, terrorism, or madness -- and the apocalyptic consequences -- are too great to tolerate. 

The culture of prevention must be fostered. 
The UN in its many forums, led by the Secretary-General, is well placed to instill attitudes and skills of conflict prevention precisely because the organization is (putting it delicately) organized flexibly. In its many disparate parts, responding in many ways to many problems, the UN can foster networks of diverse disciplines, professions, and experiences to chart promising courses of peaceful and sustainable development. The Secretary-General and his team have striven to manage these agency activities more coherently, assembling new and stronger coalitions to address key issues. More can be done by way of staffing and training within the UN, particularly in exploiting the contributions that development can make to conflict prevention. The UN can also sponsor assemblies of political, business, and NGO leaders to explore what divides these constituencies, and what brings them together. And it can invite business leaders to share more systematically their particular insights into political and economic obstacles to development. To repeat: deadly conflicts, and the conflictful elements of globalization, are usually not inevitable or irresistible. They are more often, and in large part, outcomes of decisions. Institutionalizing better decisions, the better to prevent deadly conflict, is the challenge of good governance. 

2. PROVIDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE YOUNG 

The planet's human population has now surpassed six billion. Some one billion of us are teenagers, a fact with two inescapable consequences. First, nature being what it is, this cohort of one billion will very soon begin to produce tens of millions of new babies of their own every year. Second, and in the meantime, we will all experience the energetic clamour of a billion adolescents transforming our cultures, economies, and politics. Nothing will affect human well-being more certainly than the actions we take now to provide for these new and future generations of young people. 

Demography is not destiny, but it counts for something. The human population, now expanding by about 80 million people a year, is generally projected to reach about eight billion in 2025. (It was 1.65 billion in 1900.) True, fertility rates have fallen globally and rates of population increases have subsided. But with a huge generation of females just entering their childbearing years, the experts foresee a global population that continues to grow well beyond 2025. (At the same time, to confuse things, the number of people older than 60 is projected to double in 25 years, to 1.2 billion; in some rich countries, supporting the elderly is a challenge to governance as daunting as providing for the young.) 

About 98 percent of global population growth will occur in the poorer countries of the South, where 80 percent of people now live (and where two billion are classified as malnourished). As well, by 2025 the number of people living in urban areas will reach five billion -- twice the urban population of 1990. By way of contrast, in 1950 New York and London were the only two megacities of at least eight million people; by 1995, 23 cities had surpassed eight million, 17 of them in developing countries (Table 1). By 2015, the UN Population Division expects there will be 36 such megacities, 23 of them in Asia.    
  
 

Table 1. Expected growth in cities with populations of 8 million or more.

 

	Population (millions)
Megacity	1995	2015
Tokyo, Japan	26.96	28.89
Mexico City, Mexico	16.56	19.18
Sã o Paulo, Brazil	16.53	20.32
New York, USA	16.33	17.60
Bombay, India*	15.14	26.22
Shanghai, China	13.58	17.97
Los Angeles, USA	12.41	14.22
Calcutta, India	11.92	17.31
Buenos Aires, Argentina	11.80	13.86
Seoul, South Korea	11.61	12.98
Beijing, China	11.30	15.57
Osaka, Japan	10.61	10.61
Lagos, Nigeria*	10.29	24.61
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil	10.18	11.86
Delhi, India*	9.95	16.86
Karachi, Pakistan*	9.73	19.38
Cairo, Egypt	9.69	14.42
Paris, France	9.52	9.69
Tianjin, China	9.42	13.53
Metro Manila, Philippines*	9.29	14.66
Moscow, Russia	9.27	9.30
Jakarta, Indonesia*	8.62	13.92
Dhaka, Bangladesh*	8.55	19.49
* Cities expected to grow by more than 50 percent by 2015.

These are intimidating numbers, but they don't capture the scale of the coming crisis for young people, or for the rest of us. The calamity is in the context: inequalities of income and opportunity that grow worse and not better; absolute deprivation that intensifies for millions; environmental exhaustion; bloody struggles of scarcity, living space, and systems of belief; and lethal failures of governance. 

UNICEF, in The Progress of Nations 1999, pictured the birth of a child in the century's last months, the six-billionth baby in a population of six billion, and drew the face of inequality. That child had less than 1 chance in 10 of being born into relative prosperity, and 3 chances in 10 of suffering extreme poverty. (At last estimate, more than 1.2 billion human beings are straining to survive on incomes of US $1 or less a day.) Born in Malawi or Uganda, that child will probably live half as long as one born the same day in Singapore or Sweden. The child might well be already an orphan; every year, 600 000 women die from pregnancy-related causes or in childbirth, nearly all of them in developing countries. Millions more children have been orphaned by AIDS. For want of education and health care, the six-billionth child will suffer even greater hardships if she is a girl. 

The effects of these disparities on the young are manifold and dangerous. They imperil social peace, exclude millions from a share of globalization's benefits, and foreclose opportunities for future development. It is in these inequalities that we see the intricate connections between development and freedom. Poverty imprisons the poor; that much is well understood. But the wealthy in divided societies -- cringing in their armed and gated compounds, afraid of the night and the future -- can hardly be described as free. Inequalities have a way of claiming everyone as victims. 

And the global disparities are plentiful. Thailand has more cell phones than all of Africa. As for the Internet, North America with 5 percent of the world's population accounts for almost 50 percent of all Internet users. UNDP makes the reinforcing point that income buys access, and thus the chance for more income. Buying a computer would cost the average Bangladeshi more than 8 years' income, compared with 1 month's for an average American. 

Furthermore, there is a pernicious synergy to globalization that sooner or later seems to entangle every problem in every other problem. Resource scarcity drives poor people to over-use soils or forests, causing more poverty; ethnic conflict motivates migration, squeezing strangers together, disrupting economies, and igniting new conflict; malevolent government leads to violence, displacement, and poverty, and then (often) more malevolent government. 

It is probable, for example, that by 2025 two of every three people in the world will have to live with water scarcities of some degree -- and with all the potential for dispute and conflict that such scarcities imply. But scarcities alone don't cause conflict or chronic poverty. Rather, scarcities combine explosively with other political, economic, and cultural factors in chain reactions of privation, grievance, war, and migration. These are the borderless interactions that threaten us all, and especially the young. They reconstruct our ideas of sovereignty and space, and reorganize our national interests. And they will demand good governance, within and across national borders. 

No interaction of globalization endangers the young more surely than the sovereign debt that poor countries owe to the rich (Box 3). Indeed, UNDP has reported that debt servicing has exceeded health spending in 29 heavily indebted poor countries, including 23 in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, of course, global flows of official development aid have declined throughout the 1990s, while debt charges have risen. The costs to children, in the present and into the future, continue to mount. 
 

BOX 3 Children Pay the Price Debt has a child's face. Debt's burden falls most heavily on the minds and bodies of children, killing some, and stunting others so that they will never fully develop. It leaves children without immunization against fatal, but easily preventable, diseases. It condemns them to a life without education or -- if they go to school -- to classrooms without roofs, desks, chairs, blackboards, books, even pencils. And it orphans them, as hundreds of thousands of mothers die in childbirth each year, die as a result of inadequacies in health care and other services that poverty perpetuates.  Certainly, developing country governments that favour their own elites over their poor also bear much of the responsibility. But debt's demands make it hard for many governments to restructure their budgets towards more child-centred priorities even when they want to, and make it well-nigh impossible to succeed even if they do. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, spends more on servicing its $200 billion debt than on the health and education of its 306 million children. The pattern is economically senseless and morally indefensible.   -- Shridath Ramphal

The slow-moving program of debt relief for these countries, insufficiently strengthened in 1999, therefore needs radical acceleration along the practical lines proposed by UNDP, Oxfam, Jubilee 2000, and several creditor countries. Moreover, debt relief should be linked explicitly to added investments in constructive development: education, health, environmental protection, and the like. Here we are only reasserting what everyone knows: these debts are an insupportable burden on poor economies; they are unpayable and uncollectable. The children meanwhile suffer. 

Persisting inequalities, a more squalid poverty in the teeming new megacities, environmental destruction as millions more people deplete the land for food and fuel, a rising probability of conflict: these are the terrible implications of misgovernance, embedded in a shared failure to provide for our children and their children. But failure is not inevitable. There are preventive remedies at hand that are practical, affordable, and effective. They are not available to any government acting alone. They require the collaboration of governments with others in the global community, and a modest commitment of political courage. Here the UN can claim ready-made advantages in its infrastructure of institutions, expertise, and processes. This is where the unique character of the UN

-- its universality, its power to convoke, its particular legitimacy -- creates real openings for leadership and action. 

To prove the possibility of cooperative action, here are four pragmatic endeavours that can dramatically open opportunities for youth by enhancing their access to the necessities of life. 

Rescue the children from the HIV/AIDS plague.
More than 33 million people in the world are now living with HIV and AIDS. Over 14 million have already died

more than 11 million of them in Africa, where AIDS leads all other causes of death in the 15­24 age group. By the end of 2000, 13 million or more of the world's children will have lost their mothers or both parents to AIDS. 

Ninety percent of new infections occur in poor countries, disproportionately in Africa. Two million Africans were killed by AIDS in 1998, 10 times more than in all the continent's wars that year. Women and children suffer especially. In sub-Saharan Africa, six adolescent girls are infected for every boy the same age

the misogynistic arithmetic of male promiscuity and female powerlessness. As a result, HIV infection rates among pregnant women in Africa are fearfully high: at least 20 percent in many countries, as high as 60 percent in some towns. Children die of AIDS because they become infected or because their families are impoverished by its effects. Orphaned or not, they are victims in the end of malnutrition, inadequate health care, prejudice, and neglect. 

This is a global plague. (India now counts more people living with HIV and AIDS than any other country.) It demands a global response, for the children's sake. 

A public-private partnership, with the personal encouragement of the UN Secretary-General, has reached an early stage of formation for the purpose of combating HIV and AIDS in Africa. We urge prompt progress in that project, with the objective of cutting HIV infection rates among the young by 25 percent in 5 years. That requires an energetic collaboration of UN agencies, African and industrialized-country governments, and the private sector. Prevention is key to achieving the goal, through education, counselling, and frank public debate. But success almost certainly demands something else: an improved access to expensive drugs in countries too poor to buy them at current prices. This might mean relaxing patent protections

and trade rules that keep those drug prices unaffordably high. Here again, a transborder threat demands a cooperative response. The governance challenge is to reward invention while properly distributing invention's benefits. 

Enrol every child in basic education.
Through all of the 1990s, and with disheartening frequency, delegations at international conferences have solemnly accepted the obligation of universal access to primary education

and just as frequently failed to honour it. This is profoundly destructive, condemning millions of young people to a future barren of opportunity or hope. In The State of the World's Children 2000, UNICEF estimates that more than 130 million children worldwide are not in school. Worse, millions more children work in hazardous or unhealthy labour instead of going to school. Basic education, formal or informal, in class or not, can rescue whole communities for a better future. More than half the children who are not in school are girls. This is an injustice, and a waste. To quote The Progress of Nations 1999: "As more girls are educated, and for longer periods, their confidence and empowerment will rise, and infant mortality and population growth will fall

all of this a boon to life expectancy and overall economic growth." 

Big capital projects are not the measure of success here; the object is to educate, not to build schools. And there are successful models to learn from. In Brazil, for example, the Comunidade Solidária programs train thousands of young people every year for productive employment. In several Asian countries, the International Youth Foundation has started a program in which multinational firms finance training in community development for young female factory workers, to use when they return to their villages for marriage. Modest in their way, these efforts demonstrate the barely explored value available in government­ business­NGO partnerships. 

This is a classic case of quite minuscule investments yielding tremendous returns. Small diversions of national budgets and aid allocations to basic education, in close cooperation with NGOs, international organizations, and others, will generate literally life-changing improvements. Why is such easy action so scarce? The shamefully obvious explanation is that children are politically weak. They can neither threaten nor promise, and they have no vote. But when the trifling cost is measured against the huge and lasting benefits, government leaders have no excuse not to act; they still have their own promises to keep. 

Expand access to the Internet in developing countries, especially for the young. 
Access to telecommunications (and, in a real sense, to the future) is constricted by geography, gender, income, and language. In fact, half of humankind has never placed a phone call. Modest investments, and the removal of obstructing government regulations, can enable more people to access the World Wide Web, dial a cell phone, or to use satellite TV for something more than ESPN. From Estonia to India, town halls and village schools are going online (Estonia has more computers per capita than France or Italy). Inexpensive, fast, and accessible communications free people and their organizations to learn about agronomy, the treatment of diarrhea, or the redress of a human-rights violation. Now, with satellite and cellular systems, poor economies can skip the old pole-and-wire technologies altogether as they sign on to the communications revolution. And the Internet is startlingly cheap, as UNDP has noted: to send a 40-page document from Madagascar to Côte d'Ivoire can cost $75 by 5-day courier, $45 for a 30-minute fax, or less than 20 cents by 2-minute email. 

But the Internet so far has polarized the world in yet another inequality of haves and have-nots, the plugged-in and the unplugged. South Asia is home to 20 percent of the global population, but less than 1 percent of Internet users. Even with the new technologies, installation costs are significant where (as in much of rural Africa) telephone services are scarce. And, of course, Internet connections hardly benefit the illiterate and the innumerate. 

This is why policies for basic education, economic development, and communications regulation are all of a piece in the present age and why governments must collaborate with NGOs, industry, and international organizations to share the gains of globalization. In the Philippines and Senegal, to cite two good examples, telephone companies were required to provide specified services to rural and poor communities as a condition of their licences. In Bangladesh and Mauritius, governments eliminated tariffs and taxes on personal computers to foster their proliferation. These are manageable reforms at small cost, for large returns, if they are enforced. 

It should also be said that faster, cheaper global communications will make people more aware of their own government's performance in comparison with the (now visible) performance of others, and maybe less tolerant of failures. This is not a bad thing, if good governance is an objective. 

Two more actions to protect children's health (and redeem a few other broken promises). 
The links between wealth and health are hard and unforgiving. Children in poverty are commonly denied basic health care, schooling, safe water, and sanitation. If they survive, they grow up and die poor. The diseases of poverty prey with special tragedy on the young. Malaria, for example, claims as many as three million lives every year, 80 percent of them children. With up to half a million new cases occurring a year, the incidence of this disease, once assumed eradicable, is actually rising around the world. Malaria is one of the many preventable diseases that thrive in poverty. 

In point of fact, the best that could be done for the health of the 
world's children (including those in rich countries) would be to raise the incomes of the poor. But we do not plead here for some grand new design to eliminate poverty. Instead, we remind governments of their own (unkept) promises of the 1990 World Summit for Children and advance two modest proposals. 

First: Discourage tobacco consumption.
In the words of Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director-General of the World Health Organization: "Wherever we come from and whatever we do, we are never truly safe from the long arm of the tobacco industry as they search the world for new markets and victims." But because per-capita cigarette consumption is generally declining in the rich countries, tobacco companies are creating those new markets and new victims mostly in middle-income and developing economies. The exposure of the young to tobacco smoke, and their early addiction to nicotine, together represent one of the great and ominous public-health menaces of this new century. 

Already, about four million people a year die of smoking-related illnesses: 11 000 preventable deaths a day. WHO estimates 10 million a year will be dying from smoking by about 2025, 70 percent of them in developing countries. Meantime, the number of smokers globally is expected on current trends to rise to 1.6 billion in 2025 from the present 1.1 billion. Since there is a lag of 25 to 30 years between the onset of chronic smoking and death, the future's casualty rates are built into today's addiction rates. 

Children are victimized twice: first as the offspring of smoking parents, then as smokers themselves. Children of smoking mothers suffer higher rates of intrauterine retardation and low birthweight. Evidence indicates that having a parent who smokes increases risks of sudden infant death syndrome, respiratory illnesses, ear infections, learning difficulties, and language impairment. Then, in their teens or sooner, the young are the vulnerable targets of tobacco industry marketing on television and movie screens and billboards, in discos and stadiums, in magazines -- all identifying cigarette smoking with what is glamorous, successful, sexy, and worldly. To quote Brundtland again: "It is rare if not impossible to find examples in history that match tobacco's programmed trail of death and destruction." 

Policies to stop smoking can succeed; they are succeeding now in many countries, if not fast or thoroughly enough. But they can only ultimately prevail if pursued globally, as a collaboration of governments, business, science, NGOs, and international institutions, with marketing programs as sophisticated as tobacco's own. A good start was made in 1999, with the launch of the WHO-sponsored Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The Convention rightly reflects the fact that suppressing tobacco consumption must be multisectoral: tax increases (especially effective in discouraging the young from buying their first smokes); agricultural transition programs; "counter-advertising" against the industry and its products; prohibitions on sales to minors and against smoking in the workplace and public places; warning labels; strict controls on tobacco advertising and promotions; and transnational action against smuggling. We recommend adoption of the Convention by May 2003, as WHO proposes. The pay-off for reducing cigarette smoking is prompt and lasting, in higher tax revenues, lower health-care costs, and smaller losses in productivity. The suffering thereby prevented is incalculable. 

Second: Get the lead out.
The health and futures of children everywhere can be quickly and markedly improved by removing lead from gasoline. Lead is a poisonous heavy metal, especially toxic to the brain, kidneys, the reproductive system, and cardiovascular function. As the World Resources Institute and others have reported, lead poisoning remains the single most significant and preventable disease associated with an environmental toxin. And it is a special hazard to young children: lead exposures reduce children's IQs and are linked to attention disorders, aggression, and delinquency. 

Leaded gasoline is by far the largest source of lead exposure in urban areas: about 90 percent of all lead emissions in the air come from gasoline. Aside from posing an immediate health risk when inhaled, lead accumulates in soils, drinking water, and in the food chain. 

Despite all this hard evidence, however, scarcely more than a dozen countries have phased out leaded gasoline (Figure 2). This represents both an opportunity and an obligation. Lead poisoning can be prevented easily and cheaply. With available technology and in short order, the lives and life chances of millions of children would be immediately enhanced by an internationally coordinated program of removing lead from gasoline. Experience in Mexico City and the United States, for example, shows blood lead levels decline almost instantaneously as lead emissions fall (Figure 3).
 
  Figure 2. Use of Leaded Gasoline Worldwide.
  Figure 3. Decreases in Blood Lead Values and Amounts of Lead Used in Gasoline in the United States, 1976­1980.

What can achieve such a success? Public education can teach consumers the virtues of unleaded fuels and build public support for policy changes. And market-based incentives can lubricate refinery conversion. For example, during a (quite brief) phase-out period, fuel taxes can help to price leaded gasoline higher than unleaded. In Britain, according to the World Resources Institute, the price differential between leaded and unleaded petrol has grown to 11 percent as consumers and vehicle manufacturers complete the transition. 

Facilitated through existing UN networks and agencies, a lead-abolition campaign would do more than improve the health of children. It would create new practices and associations among governments, businesses, and institutions -- groundwork for future cooperation in pollution abatement, energy conservation, or the management of climate change. Good governance begets better governance. 

There is an additional happy bonus to lead-removal programs: countries can recover the costs, 5 or 10 times over, in lower health-care costs, savings on engine maintenance, and longer engine life. This is why government­industry­public collaboration can be so profitable. The health and economic pay-offs are rich enough to reward all participants in the program. And the first to benefit are children. 
 

3. MANAGING CLIMATE CHANGE T

his we know. The Arctic ice is melting. Global mean sea levels have risen 10 to 15 centimetres in the past century. Sea levels have reached their highest in 5 000 years, and are rising now at a rate 10 times faster than the average during that period. The 1990s were the hottest decade since measurements started in the 1860s; 1998 was hotter than any year before. Surface air temperatures around the world are higher now than a century ago (Figure 4). Earth's climate is changing. 
  Figure 4. Surface Air Temperature from 1860 to 1997. 

We also know, with a grim and growing certainty, that some part at least of global warming is human-made. This is not the first period of climate change in the history of the planet. But there is now a formidable and strengthening consensus among scientists, and an increasing consistency of evidence, on the links between the production of greenhouse gases and the warming of the atmosphere. (The World Meteorological Organization reckons, from the evidence of tree rings, ice cores, and other data, that the 20th century was the hottest in a thousand years.) Science tells us that, up to a point, the greenhouse effect is both natural and necessary. Greenhouse gases (chiefly carbon dioxide, CO₂) allow sunlight to reach the Earth's surface, then block infrared radiation bouncing back into space; that's what keeps us warm. Too much of those greenhouse gases, however, will keep us too warm. And since the start of the industrial revolution, the cumulative tonnages of CO₂ emissions into the atmosphere have increased a thousandfold, mostly from burning fossil fuels. 

The climate warming already measured closely follows computer-model projections of what human-made greenhouse gases would do to atmospheric temperatures. By 1996, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change had concluded that there is "a discernible human influence on global climate." Harder to predict -- and even more troubling -- are the coming consequences of global warming. (Not only was 1998 the hottest year yet, it was also the worst year ever recorded for weather-related disasters. Floods and storms killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions from their homes and livelihoods.) Climatologists expect the energy stored in a warmer atmosphere will generate stronger storms and ocean surges. Thawing icecaps will raise sea levels, threatening coastal areas and island states with inundation. Rainfall could increase significantly in some regions, while droughts descend on others. Biodiversity could be lost as species fail to adapt fast enough to their altered environments. Tropical diseases like malaria and dengue would likely migrate north and south. 

As the United Nations Environment Programme has glumly reported in its Outlook 2000, global warming "now seems inevitable." Even allowing for possible benign effects (longer growing seasons at higher latitudes?), simple prudence argues for action against the real and multiple dangers. One class of precaution will have to include measures to cope with effects already under way: protection or even evacuation of vulnerable coastal populations (Figure 5); reforestation against hillside erosion and desertification; breeding new crops to thrive in different weather; immunization and other public health programs. Note well: phenomena like coastal flooding, the intensification of storms, and the destabilizing thaw of northern tundra are part of the warming that has already occurred. Inaction is not an option, and indifference will lead to greater disaster. 
 
  Figure 5. Heavily Populated Delta Regions that Are Vulnerable to Sea Level Rise.

Just as urgent are the longer-term actions that prudence requires to suppress future greenhouse-gas emissions (and brake the speed of future warming). Some of the challenges here are technical; those are the easy ones. The hard problems are political and institutional, problems of governance. The technical issues have to do with engineering and cost recovery. The politics are all about who pays, and who benefits. 

The problem of effectively managing climate change gives proof of how unprepared we are with institutions to secure global public goods. The problem is global, but policy-making is still mostly national. The problem can only be solved by networks of firms, scientists, engineers, producers, and consumers, but our institutions and negotiations are still mostly intergovernmental. And while everybody stands to gain by minimizing the global harm of climate change, the actual gains and costs can bear unequally and unfairly on people around the world. 

Let us say (as the scientific consensus does) that global CO₂ emissions must be cut below 1990 levels just to stabilize future atmospheric concentrations even at higher levels. Who in the world should do the cutting? Rich industrial countries -- the ones that mostly got us into this mess? Or developing countries -- whose energy demands and carbon emissions are rising fastest? And, to ask the more basic question, how should that issue be decided? 

What we cannot do is shirk these questions. Global energy use, as reported by the World Resources Institute, has increased almost 70 percent since 1971; it is projected to rise more than 2 percent annually for the next 15 years. Without concerted international action, that alone would raise greenhouse-gas emissions about 50 percent higher than current levels. Without intervention, the rate of global warming will accelerate, and so will the accumulation of risks. Sovereignty, in these circumstances, will only have meaning in global collaboration, and the interests of states are bound inextricably to the interests of others. 

So we are back to governance, to politics and institutions. Suppressing greenhouse-gas emissions demands thoroughgoing economic transformation -- starting with reductions in the burning of coal and oil, the high-carbon fossil fuels that do much of the damage. That means new kinds of engines, whole new systems of transportation, new buildings and new industrial processes. It can also mean the destruction of entire industries, and the collapse of the communities they support. Again, who pays? 

The answer can begin with a cheerful array of truths. In the first place, the speed of global economic change itself can absorb much of the shock. The World Bank has estimated that as much as 80 percent of world industrial output in 2010 will be produced by firms that today do not even exist; those firms will be born into a low-carbon global economy, if that is what we decide to create. In the second place, new fortunes will be made and benefits derived from the clean new industries that will overtake or resupply dirty old industries -- if markets are properly organized. (Somebody will have to build the motors that replace gasoline engines, and sell natural-gas burners for power plants.) In the third place, the same (expensive) measures that can reduce the rise in CO₂ emissions in the long run can yield welcome side-effects in the short run, including air-quality improvements saving hundreds of thousands of lives every year. 

For all the money that governments and others will have to spend to manage climate change, there is much money to be saved as well (Table 2). Think what governments everywhere spend on subsidies for energy, agriculture, roads, and water consumption -- all factors in the environmentally harmful, high-carbon economy. As an Earth Council report has observed, the world is "spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to support its own destruction." By eliminating such subsidies and redistributing the proceeds, governments can save money while they save the Earth. 
 

Table 2. The World's 10 most costly insurance losses.

Event	Year	Loss  (billions of US $)
Hurricane Andrew (USA)	1992	18.0
Northridge earthquake (USA)	1994	13.5
Hurricane Mireille (Japan)	1991	6.5
Winter storm Daria (Europe)	1990	5.6
Hurricane Hugo (Puerto Rico)	1989	5.4
Autumn storm (Europe)	1987	4.2
Winter storm Vivian (Europe)	1990	3.9
Piper Alpha explosion (Britain)	1988	2.7
Kobe earthquake (Japan)	1995	2.6
Hurricane Opal (USA)	1995	2.2

So there is a general global interest in controlling global warming's worst effects, and particular costs to be paid. To distribute those costs and benefits fairly and effectively, what is needed is a "grand bargain" and the governance to keep it. To that end, we offer here four practical approaches. 

Breathe new political life into the Kyoto Protocol.
More than 170 governments have ratified the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, agreed at the Rio Earth Summit. That committed industrialized countries to negotiate the restoration of greenhouse-gas emissions by 2000 to the levels of 1990, an undertaking they now cannot meet. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the Convention commits industrialized countries to cut emissions of six greenhouse gases by at least 5 percent from 1990 levels by 2012. This would only be a small step toward the declared aim of stabilizing accumulations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But it is a step not yet taken. 

The Kyoto Protocol represents more than a life-saving but unfulfilled commitment. It also provides the rudimentary but useful outline of the essential grand bargain between rich and developing countries. The Convention and Protocol together suggest the sequence and character of cooperative actions that rich and poor countries must take if the planet we all inhabit is to be rescued from the worst effects of global warming. In short, rich countries can meet their Kyoto commitments both by investing in emission reductions at home and by transferring money and technology to poor countries. Either way, an industrialized country earns emission credits that can be applied to its own account or traded internationally. The bargain turns on the pivotal fact that a dollar spent by a rich country in a poor country can generate a more powerful climate-saving benefit than a dollar spent domestically. The governance challenge is to organize that mutually beneficial transaction, in a coordination of governments, industries, and communities. 

Accelerate the start-up of the Clean Development Mechanism.  

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a key governance innovation contained in the Kyoto Protocol, but so far remains little more than words on paper. Significantly, many of the governments that signed the Protocol have been slower to act than firms around the world that are already creating a market in emission-reduction programs -- political decision again falling behind business innovation. The CDM is the machinery that can put the bargain in motion, helping industrialized countries meet their emission obligations at home while helping to finance a rising prosperity in the poor countries. The CDM can, and should, become a critical instrument of sustainable development. 

For example (and hypothetically), the European Union and Nigeria might conclude that a million dollars invested in Nigeria on clean-power generation and oilfield improvements would yield far greater emission reductions than a million dollars spent in Europe. Mediated through the CDM with active industry involvement, the EU transfer of money and technology would count as a contribution to Europe's emission-reduction commitment and speed Nigerian development. Or, Japan and Brazil might calculate that Amazon reforestation and restoration -- recreating the natural "carbon sink" that absorbs CO₂ from the atmosphere -- would cost less than a comparable reduction of emissions in Japan. Forest conservation (with its many other benefits) could count toward Japan's Kyoto obligation. 

The CDM has been too slow to move, partly because of the details and partly because too few governments have deployed sufficient will. (Progress has also been impeded because authority and obligation have been spread too thinly across several UN institutions.) One answer is to start bilaterally instead of multilaterally, with demonstration projects showing how emissions trading might work. Prototypes already present themselves. In Costa Rica, the Netherlands and Sweden have bought developing-country debt in exchange for reforestation; in effect, the three countries together are converting a financial obligation into a global public good. Canada and Honduras have struck a similar bargain. Swapping debt for greenhouse-gas action looks entirely doable, and productive. 

The CDM lacks an institutional platform. Build one. 
UNDP and others have suggested an "international bank for environmental settlements." As described in UNDP's 1998 Human Development Report, the bank "would act as a clearing house for the global environmental market, matching parties in environmental trade, mediating borrowing and lending and ensuring the 
integrity of market transactions and their settlement. ... It would balance the positions of large and small traders by offering a neutral trading base and an anonymous process in which several small sellers could meet large buyers." Good idea. This is how the costs and benefits of emission reductions, carbon sinks, and debt swaps can be transacted with efficiency and fairness. 

This is not a call for another bureaucracy. The foundations and much of the expertise for an environment bank already exist. The Global Environment Facility, set up in 1991, is a collaboration of UNDP, UNEP, and the World Bank. It is the temporary funding arrangement for the Climate Change Convention, and could be much more than that. 

Initiate a virtuous collusion among governments to cut anti-environment subsidies. 
UNEP, in its woeful Outlook 2000, figured that governments altogether spend more than $700 billion every year "subsidizing environmentally unsound practices in the use of water, agriculture, energy and road transport." Whatever high-minded purposes might have originally justified such subsidies, they invariably develop strong political roots. Their removal is all the more difficult when beneficiaries can threaten to leave the country if subsidies are withdrawn. Governments can improve the environment, and their budgets, by conspiring together in subsidy elimination. If farm communities need support, they can be helped directly -- not by subsidies that encourage wasting scarce water or burning high-carbon fuels, but by income supports that actually reward conservation. The conspiracies we recommend do not require big negotiations of the WTO kind; they can start with neighbouring countries, protecting shared environments. 

One last, short observation on this subject. Much has been said about NIMBY, or Not In My Backyard, the natural and selfish tendency to want the benefits of a fine environment without enduring the inconveniences. We think the NIMBY syndrome can be turned to a global public good, and a force for democratic governance. After all, some of the world's most toxic environmental malpractice has been committed in the dictatorships, where NIMBY had no influence except among the favoured élites. The more people understand the true costs of the high-carbon economy, the perils of climate change to themselves and their children, and the real opportunities for reform, the more they will insist on achieving that reform. Transparency and accountability in governance -- in every institution of power -- will make for better environment policy. Managing climate change is probably only possible if the management is democratic. 

FINAL WORD 

With respect to all three of these imperatives -- preventing deadly conflict, providing opportunities for the young, and managing climate change -- we acknowledge that our recommendations are for the most part neither revolutionary nor original. They are conventional in almost every detail (to a fault, some will say). But if they were actually carried out, these simple proposals would improve governance in transformative ways. The dynamic opportunities of globalization would be more readily seized, the perils mitigated, and the costs more fairly shared. It is a project for which the UN, as facilitator and coordinator, is uniquely equipped to promote the necessary public­private partnerships. 

Document(s) 5 of 11