Tag Archives: Ethics

Water Slide: Tackling our Freshwater Deficits, Dr. Robert Zuber

28 Mar
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I am haunted by waters.  Norman Maclean

If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.  Margaret Atwood

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.  Wallace Stevens

Dip him in the river who loves water.  William Blake

He liked the darkness, but this was oppressing. It almost flooded his being. Dean F. Wilson

Water, like love, is good at finding where it’s meant to be. Corinne Beenfield

By early light I am asleep in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood. Billy Collins

The UN had a good week in some key aspects, including an excellent Arria Formula event on threats to UN peacekeepers from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and a political declaration adopted by the General Assembly affirming  the need for “Equitable Global Access to COVID-19 Vaccines” (click here) at a time when “vaccine nationalism” is only slowly giving way to a more generous – if also economically self-interested — disposition on vaccine distribution, including to those nations which have still to administer a single shot.

It was also a week when the UN assessed its commitment to ensuring freshwater access to the millions of people for whom such access is tenuous at best.  On World Water Day, many sectors within the UN system paused to weigh responsibilities to the water and sanitation goals which are key both to sustainable development and to addressing the “conflict multiplier” which water increasingly represents as, in too many communities across the globe, access to safe water has become a luxury increasingly elusive to secure though ultimately more precious than silver or gold.

As the president of the UN Economic and Social Council, Ambassador Akram of Pakistan warned this week, at our current rate half the world’s population will likely suffer from severe water stress by the year 2050.  This was perhaps our most cited comment (on Twitter) in the past week, a testament to the misery, displacement and potential conflict which diplomats and the larger policy community recognize is looming on our collective horizon if we cannot find the urgent means to ensure safe and equitable water access.  We are reminded every day of the many people worldwide for whom mere hand-washing in the midst of a pandemic creates harsh water use choices, others for whom the dignity of adequate sanitation remains a distant dream. And as noted with regularity by our colleague in El Salvador, Marta Benavides, our response at policy level is often to talk too much and change too little. Water, despite what we wish to believe, is no longer “finding where it needs to be,” and we are yet doing too little to help restore lifegiving pathways.

Most of those who would read weekly missives such as this one don’t need to be reminded of the central role water plays in our contemporary world as the largest repositories of fresh water on our planet – the polar ice caps – continue to melt into the sea at unheard of rates, and as climate change imposes alternating jolts of flooding and drought on many millions of people living in poverty, undermining their food security and setting many on uncertain journeys to find places where this most basic of needs can be procured, albeit in unfamiliar and even hostile contexts. 

In many of our so-called developed countries, water-related imagery often infuses our artistic and unconscious lives though, as a pragmatic resource, we have largely taken it for granted.  While we occasionally recognize that vast differences in water quality exist in communities across a country like the US, we nevertheless anticipate that what flows from our taps remains both reliable and relatively safe, an entitlement of sorts for which there is simply no equivalent in war-torn or economically stressed communities.  Indeed, we know here that the water we have available for our own sanitation purposes is generally (and often needlessly) higher in quality than any water available at all to families in communities habitually threatened by the twin killers of flooding and drought.

There are “solutions” of sort for countries and communities facing water scarcity but they are often complex.  Moving water from where it is abundant to where it is lacking is a herculean task as is funding and installing technologies to desalinate sea water for coastal communities.  But NGOs and state partners are making welcome progress in creating community-based solutions to elevate water abundance – including catchment capacity to ensure that water availability remains accessible.  Lamentably, such solutions face obstacles from the shifting modalities of climate change to unregulated industries in our broken economies that raise the stakes such that water “caught” is often dangerous for personal use. In too many places, the “slide” of water, both of access and quality, continues unabated. A “dip in the river” in too many places is less a refreshing interlude and more an invitation to deadly disease.

Still, there is much that we in the “water entitled” world can do to sharpen our attentiveness to water-related concerns while contributing to a safe water environment for others.  Part of this relates to, as already noted, our personal water uses: watering less, flushing less, fixing leaks, restricting uses of toxic fertilizer and other products that are likely to enter – and degrade – our water supply.  One could add to this measures to mitigate the diverse impacts of climate change on our farms and ice caps – walking rather than driving to errands, shifting to green energy sources, doing more to restore watersheds or eliminate the river toxins that lead to ocean pollution (and fund those who lead on this work).  Our water savings may not make a dent in other, drought-stricken areas of the world, but greater water-use consciousness can lead to support for policies and practices that offer some tangible hope for the drought-affected.

But another aspect of our responsibility is related to an issue that we are often loath to discuss in these parts – our patterns of consumption – specifically consumption related to water demand, the uses beyond our sight, beyond our attention, even beyond our comprehension.  For those of you who have the time and interest, I urges you to click here for the website of Water Calculator which, along with sites such Foodnorthwest.org provides hard data on water usage and wastewater which accompanies the production of some of our most common consumer items.  From automobiles and leather goods to beef production and avocados, the vast quantities of water needed to produce our personal transportation and the items we voraciously pull from the shelves of our local big-box stores, can be shocking. 

One wonders: Would we willingly adjust our consumption patters if we knew that the leather shoes we have been coveting required an average of 3,626 gallons of water to produce?  Would we be so quick to replace our bed sheets if we recognized that an average of 2,839 gallons of water were required to make them soft and attractive? Would we adjust our eating habits if we knew that it takes as much as 450 gallons of water to prepare one cow for the grilling of steaks or the sandwiches of “we have the meats” Arby’s? And would it matter if we were to grasp that so much of what we in the “developed” world now consume is produced in communities which themselves are often water insecure, products made by the hands of women and men who use more water at work than they and their communities might ever be able to access in their non-working hours? And, if they were able to access it, knowing that it might well have been made more toxic through runoff/effluence from the very facilities which pay their often-meager wages?

These loops represent ethical and even spiritual dilemmas both “haunting” and unsustainable. As many of you recognize, this is the season of Passover for Jews and Holy Week for Christians, a time to celebrate divine gifts but also to reclaim the responsibilities commensurate with those gifts.  As one of my good colleagues put it, “No Sunday is sacred until we all have access to safe water and sanitation.” This is not an uncomplicated aspiration, to be sure, but it is an important one, and could well be a sacred one. Those of us who can choose to over-water our plants, luxuriate in our showers, and indulge in water-saturated consumption with impunity could stand to learn some new habits, habits which acknowledge our collective, growing water scarcity with grave implications for human health and global tension.

In a time when what relatively little fresh water remains threatens to be commodified, when this “global public good” is in danger of becoming one more resource to be controlled by wealthy individuals and states, we need to reset our water priorities at policy and personal levels without delay.  If we fail to do so, our ability to prevent our conflicts, feed our populations and protect our people from pandemics and other diseases will become increasingly impaired.  We are at a critical moment now regarding this most fundamental of resources.  Any further slide in access and quality jeopardizes many and ultimately serves the interests of none.

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Calling for Clarity and Constancy: The UN Doubles Back on Recent Commitments and Expectations, Dr. Robert Zuber

17 Jan

Back in October 2015, under Argentina’s leadership and with the support of several other member states, the UN held a panel on Ethics for Sustainable Development.

We commented at the time on both the format and substance of a discussion that we found to be notable at several levels, including its focus on the many ways in which those who control capital flows and labor relationships have increased inequality at a time when most of us at the UN feel an urgency to narrow it.

This past Wednesday, with leadership from Panama’s Ambassador Flores, part II of this assessment of our collective ethical responsibilities to sustainable development was held.   The large and enthusiastic audience filling the Trusteeship Council chamber, including a large number of permanent representatives, attested again to the importance of the UN’s ethical responses to its own high commitments and the broad expectations thus raised.   The content of this discussion was both structural and personal, and demonstrated much overlap with the October event.

For us, such overlap was welcome as it reinforced sentiments shared by Palau, the Netherlands, panelist Dr. Bernardo Kliksberg and others, that while we are certainly capable of overcoming avarice and other forms of malice, ethics is hard, habituated work for persons (and institutions) as “complex” as we all tend to be.  Sustaining ethical behavior requires regular reinforcement and self-scrutiny even (especially) at the heart of global governance.   Unfortunately, as Dr. Kliksberg noted, we have spent too much of our collective energy “hardening our hearts” and waiting for technology to soften the blows which we have inflicted on ourselves through our generalized inattentiveness and our “speculative, unbridled greed.”  We can (and should) do a better job of cultivating our ethical nature, as noted by Liberia, but there are few short-cuts – no pills to swallow or aps to download that can keep us from having to set out on the long and often winding ethical road.

The “ethical roadmap,” cited by Ambassador Flores, is an important contribution to SDG fulfillment, but as we know from our own work with Green Map System, maps are mostly useful only when people desire to get to the places to which the maps point us.  The more thoroughly we cultivate and model ethical behavior, the more we reinforce the notion that ethics is a daily walk and not an episodic one, the more useful that ethical roadmap will become.

The Deputy Secretary-General, as is often his welcome role, sought to assist event organizers in rallying diplomats and NGOs to embrace an ethic worthy of this “unprecedented” SDG agenda.   He shared the view that the SDGs can best be understood as a “declaration of interdependence,” a declaration that privileges solidary with the most vulnerable.   We at the UN have raised expectations very high now; meeting this ambitious calling requires us to be regularly informed by those whom we seek to support.  It requires us to reach out intently, but also to reach deeply, beyond our zones of comfort to places hard to reach and even harder to address.   The “margins” we acknowledge here in New York are often safer and more “recognizable” spaces than those framing the context for families struggling at the edges of desperation.

Ethics is hard work indeed, but it is hardly without its conceptual guideposts and even its satisfying moments. Dr. Kliksberg made mention of Pope Francis’ “hallowed addiction” to addressing the needs of the poor, an addiction which seems to energize the Pope and from which our own, policy-driven, poverty-reduction efforts could learn some valuable, sustaining lessons. The president of ECOSOC, Amb. Oh Joon of the Republic of Korea, cited “access to justice” as a fundamental “leveling principle,” such leveling being a key outcome of SDG fulfillment but also a cardinal value of a newly revitalized ECOSOC that will celebrate its 70th anniversary later this week at the UN.

Despite what our current economics and politics might suggest, this commitment to “leveling” is in the best interest of all of us.  We cannot continue to plunder the planet and turn the most desperate constituencies into statistical abstractions or social media caricatures.  We cannot raise the bar with one hand and use the other to smack down people desperate to grab on.

Back in the Trusteeship Council chamber, Germany was clear on the point that “ethics is not a luxury” for 2030 development implementation.   But this net must be cast wider.   The expectations that we raise across the three pillars of UN activity all have ethical components, as does our collective behavior which sometimes falls off the proverbial “wagon” when we think no one is looking.

Someone is always looking.

As many diplomats have affirmed with a sense of well-deserved pride, this is a big moment for the world; also for the UN.  If we can deliver on our development and climate promises; if we can (as Palau noted) systematize ethics in our diverse policy outcomes; if we can better balance (as Argentina urged) our national ambitions with our commitment to inclusion, then the most vulnerable will get more of what they need, the planet will stand a chance, and the UN will have made an important statement about the indispensability of multilateral frameworks going forward.

All of these qualify in whole or in part as “hallowed addictions,” worthy in their own right of our full and ethical attention.

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A System Wide Awake: Promoting an Ethical Culture for UN Policy and Development Practice, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 Oct

Those who follow diplomacy in New York might have expected a bit of a lull inside the UN after two stressful weeks of presidents and other dignitaries.   But everyone involved with the UN from diplomats to cafeteria worker, had a very short turn around.  The General Assembly committees began their work and immediately became embroiled in issues from narcotics interdiction and space weapons to the status of Western Sahara.   In addition, some most helpful side events – on the dangers of current global finance and hopes for more sustainable cities and better criminal justice — helped to fill in gaps in what needs to become a comprehensive grasp of our post-adoption responsibilities to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

One of the most intriguing events for us was one on October 5 entitled the “Ethics for Development.”  In this event, chaired by the Kazakhstan Ambassador Abdrakhmanov and co-sponsored by Panama, Argentina and Palau, the UN took a closer look at how it does its development business beyond how it sets goals and targets and locates the broad data and stable funding to make implementation possible.  In the opening panel, Argentina’s Minister Tomada urged more attention to what he called the ethics of “decent work” noting wisely the multiple, SDG-related, beneficial consequences that accrue from increased employment opportunities: ending poverty, increasing social cohesion, strengthening democracy. Chef de Cabinet Susana Malcorra, specifically citing the recent UN visit of Pope Francis, noted “ethical shortfalls” leading to an unhealthy planet and persistent economic inequalities.  Several speakers noted that, given our heavy reliance on science and technology to solve development challenges, some consideration of the ethics of those domains – including unintended consequences — was clearly in order.

And the Kazakhstan Ambassador himself provided some helpful and ethical commentary, lamenting the cultures that choose to “throw away” or cast aside persons. Given the persistence of our tendency to “discard” much of what we should treasure, the Ambassador noted that we would do well to have a “watchdog” for all who seek to implement the SDGs, to do what we can to ensure that we do not repeat grievous errors of diminishing the needs and expectations of communities and their residents, in part by carelessly or intentionally promoting development for the few to the neglect of the many.

Despite the fact that the UN is primarily a norm driven institution – setting frameworks for action more than taking action itself – “ethics” is a category that gets little air time at UN headquarters, in part perhaps because of a misunderstanding of what “doing ethics” entails.   Ethics is less about the “values” we publicly espouse and promote, and more about our thoughtful engagement with our responsibilities, as well as with the structures and practical behaviors that support or contradict responsible conduct.

More than anything else, ethics is about mindfulness, in part about the mindfulness of our limitations — of the potentially negative consequences of our own best ideas; of the ways we “misplay” our power and influence; of our capacity to deliver on our sometimes excessive promises to others.   But ethics is also about ensuring that our words, deeds, structures and finances are, to the best we are able, “speaking” with a singular voice.  It is about resisting the urge to “offload” responsibility on to others that rightly resides within us. And it is about the sometimes arduous task of incarnating goals and objectives in a way that accommodates cultural contexts and expectations, building on them more than imposing on them.

Ethics is about having the courage to “mind the gaps” that exist in our norms and practices, to be willing to ask the next question rather than getting bogged down in the last one, to anticipate changes and challenges rather than waiting for them to frustrate or even overwhelm us, to confess both our privileges and our sometimes excessive needs for reassurance and “credit.”  We do all of this as ethical beings not to “beat ourselves up” but as an invitation to the many people outside our loops of influence who actually have much to contribute to the policy work left undone, the healing that remains.

Ethics for us at the UN means living and working as though our objective truly is what we are actually privileged to pursue every day – building human potential, eliminating economic and social inequalities, caring for the planet as though our grandchildren depended on it.

Ethics in our policy contexts also means explaining ourselves so that others can discern our intentions (not necessarily agree with them).  It means using language as the basis for connection, not salesmanship.  And it implies the willingness to “de-center,” to give more than token attention to the aspirations and values of others, especially persons in so many parts of the world where aspirations have been trampled over and over by flawed governance, excessive weapons, multiple discriminations, and soul numbing poverty.

Around the UN as in other policy environments, we can discern many instances of structures and practices that contradict our responsibilities.   We have instances of unresolved allegations of rape by peacekeepers; Security Council members that violate the laws they expect other states to uphold;  states bullying other states to get their way on policy; NGOs claiming to represent what they mostly try to control.  Even the recent indictment of a former President of the General Assembly this past week gave clear evidence of another ethical contradiction: the power of money to corrupt our best intentions and literally overwhelm our worst.  We don’t often speak with a clear voice on these and related matters.  We are not sufficiently forthright about what lies behind the curtain, which we know full well is often more important than what lies in front of it.

What the events above (and others that could have been added) have in common is that they threaten the reputation of the UN as an institution, something which the UN cannot afford if it is to secure global public confidence for the long struggles ahead to heal the planet, eliminate nuclear arsenals, fulfill development commitments, achieve gender balance and address the attractions and abuses of terrorism.   Every resolution or treaty drenched in political considerations; every failure to prevent mass violence in its earliest stages; every committee deliberation doomed to repetition or irrelevance; every voice stifled by another seeking funding and status more than equity – these are no mere annoyances to a cranky, ageing philosopher (who should probably start thinking about staying home and watching Wheel of Fortune), but represent genuine threats to the long-term viability of this system.   When our system’s credibility is challenged, so too are the policies emanating from it, no matter how hopeful the garb in which they appear.

Compared to naming and promoting “moral values,” the practice of ethics is indeed a challenging craft, a special responsibility and high calling for those of us fortunate enough to labor at the center of global governance.  Thankfully, my long experience at the UN has convinced me that this is not a craft beyond our capacity. Indeed, the discussion on Ethics for Development, the diplomatic reaction to the Papal visit and other recent events demonstrate clearly that we still have more than enough to amend our course when needed, communicate forthrightly as required, deepen our policy resolve to address problems before they become crises, and see all that we need to see and not only what we are willing to see. In other words, we have all that it takes to be a more engaged focal point for ethical discernment at the center of both multi-lateral policy and global expectation.

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