Prisoner Of Hope Poem by michael spangenberg

We cannot have Sustainable Development Goals unless they stay within the climate boundary of bringing us on a pathway to stable 02°C of global warning by pre-industrial standards, climate change denial's like continuing smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, nonchalantly ignoring its health outcome doesn't keep the doctor away, much less the oncologist treating dreadful terminal cancer.

Climate change's having huge negative impacts on human rights, but there's also an opportunity side. Since we're undermining the livelihoods of the poorest people, their food security through climate shocks, through the rainy seasons not coming, through long periods of drought and flash flooding, which is happening all over Africa and South Asia: rising sea levels, we should prioritize the poorest in access to clean energy, and if they get clean energy, they'll become productive, they'll largely bring themselves out of the terrible poverty that we're making worse.

Redistribution of wealth critical in tackling poverty in dealing with climate injustice? This is a rhetorical question, tackling poverty is essential and it's good for it to be looked at through the prism of justice because there is such huge injustice in the way that climate change is happening and affecting the poorest countries and communities. It's the American way of life that's undermining the very poor life chances of much poorer people who are not responsible.

It's amazing how few doctors and nurses there are in developing countries, and the doctors and nurses were emigrating to richer countries who simply took them in as being almost doing a favor of letting doctors and nurses work in Europe or America or wherever, without realizing they're depleting the health system and not putting anything else back, any country that takes a doctor or nurse from a poor developing country should pay for the education and training of two, that would actually be the way to do it.

How to deliver on rights for those yet to be born? Being a happy Irish grandmother, I have five small grandchildren. They'll be in their 40s in 2050. They will share the world with at least 9 billion other people and I greatly worry, not just about my own children, but about that world and what they will say about us, because they will look back and they will know that we were the first generation to fully understand the implications of the need to stable 02°C, the implications of being on a pathway towards 4°, which we are now, for them, and if we don't change course next year, I believe they will be so angry about our failure of leadership, and that's a really big issue.

I can almost hear my grandchildren's voices. Will they say thank goodness they came together in 2015 in Paris, and before that, in September, with Sustainable Development goals, thank goodness? Or will they say how could they have been so cruel, how could they have been so thoughtless. You know, it's a terrible thing to be thinking. It's a very much an inter-generational thing, which is in the convention itself and it's in the whole idea of sustainable development that we should look after this world as guardians, and pass it on to our children in as good a standing as we found it. We're not doing that. We're making our world worse and worse with polluting it with greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel.

Major institutions like the IMF and the World Bank are outdated and need to be rethought, updated, restructured or overhauled, Let's face it, the UN is not perfect. I actually use the way in which Winston Churchill used to describe democracy to describe the United Nations, that it's the worst system, except for all the others. We don't have any other alternative but international law and justice.

In keeping in tune with the real world, I like to borrow, and over-borrowed, a phrase of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's. We were together on a panel in New York a couple of years ago and Archbishop Tutu was his usual enthusiastic self and his arms were waving, a journalist turned to him, almost sort of sharply, and said Archbishop Tutu, how come you're so optimistic? And he looked at her and he shook his head and he said oh, no, dearie, I'm not optimistic. As much as the USA, world's second biggest greenhouse gas emitter, will become a rogue state, if Trump's going to deliver on his promise to run the country on big oil expansion, "I'm a prisoner of hope."

Footnote - Poetic variation based in two interviews with Mary Robinson, International Bar Association (IBA) , December 15,2014; BBC world service radio, December 29,2016.