“it is imperative to recognise and use the transformative power of a dynamic ecological diplomacy.”
That is secondary to the fundamentally necessary imperative for diplomacy to work within recognition of the ecological niche which Homo sapiens occupies.
The diplomacy advocated by the author operates outside of that, and consequently is totally irrelevant to advancing the prospects for survival of world societies. Worse, it diverts attention away from where it is needed.
It is utter folly to carry out negotiations on equitably sharing the consumption of earth’s resources, minimization of its wastes. Folly without consideration of the necessity to acknowledge that we are approaching, or have exceeded, long-term sustainable rates of consumption and waste accumulation for 6.6 billion people.
The author has ignored the fundamental issue that humans are part of, embedded within, this planet’s environment; that, like rabbits fenced into a lettuce patch, continue to breed more consumers than the patch can sustain at any level of reduced consumption. Growth continues to be declared good for almost every industry. Go for growth permeates almost every aspect of the economic advice our Governments choose to follow. Worse, that advice wilfully forces an acceleration of population growth to increase it. Rabbits can be excused, but we are “the big brained mammal”.
In spite of his nice words, the author has not been “taking into account all possible opportunities for strengthening synergies with environmental and other global processes.”
Yes, “It is the duty of multilateral diplomacy to help governments go beyond general discussions and negotiate win-win consensus solutions.” But instead, we have an article masking the fundamentals set out so cogently in the Cairo conference of 1994, so sadly sidelined. Yet again, we have here an advocate for blathering rather than the positive approach taken at that conference for actual achievement of progress; again, we see here a continued sabotaging of necessary action

The smaller nations of the UN have been looking for a lever to extract concessions from the larger ones for some time, and it looks like they have found it -- for a while, at least. Until the panic over global warming subsides and people realise how much they have been fooled, the West is going to find itself the target of a great deal of moral blackmail from these little guys... including some of the most human-rights-deficient kleptocracies on the planet. Most of the cost of this network-building, inclusiveness and interactivity will come straight out of our pockets, and much of it will go straight into the pockets of green profiteers and their buddies in governments around the world.

Cut down on oil use by all means, because reliance on oil makes us hostage to sociopathic fanatics. But global warming? Now we know that the global temperature hasn't risen for nearly ten years, climate change arguments are looking very thin.

We are concentrating on the WRONG thing. We should basically forget climate change and urgently shift focus to peak oil and the genuine sustainability of societies within the new much more expensive energy regime that is about to follow on from the cheap liquid fossil fuel era.

When and only when we realise that peak oil is a thousand times more urgent than climate change, can we start to talk sensibly about the strategy for protecting our collective future.

If we start addressing peak oil with urgency, we will be concomitantly addressing climate change much more effectively than we now are with our pathetic token effort.