Towards a coherent and strategic environmental narrative

Keywords: Sustainability, environmental discourses, climate change
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In recent years, last assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) have recalled the solid unsustainable path of contemporary societies and the urgency to act. In this presentation, the author examines the evolution of the global environmental agenda since the first UN Environment Conference held in Stockholm in 1972 to highlight the need to reframe how humans will be able to reach sustainability. Over the last decades, there has been a gap between environmental awareness and policies, and the challenges posed by the ecological crisis. Emphasis will be placed, firstly, on the fundamental flaw of nesting sustainability within the paradigm of economic growth in the 1980s and early 1990s. Secondly, it will focus on the fact and effects that sustainable development and climate change discourses have significantly remained separated. Subsequently, the attention will turn on how climate discourses prevailed and it has lately resulted in the proliferation of climate emergency declarations. To avoid negative consequences of the continuous global environmental degradation and eventual resource shortages, the presentation will finally analyse the need to develop a coherent and strategic environmental narrative, which sets the biophysical limits of our planet in a central position while openly assuming, in the end, the impossibility to reproduce socioeconomic orders based on economic growth.