Could a Woman From a Small, Developing Country End the Stalemate in Climate Change Negotiations?
The feeble outcome of the December 2009 Climate change talks in Copenhagen was a huge disappointment for many.
Now, however, the UN's appointment of Costa Rican Christiana Figueres as the new head of the Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC ) offers some hope that new energy will be injected into the process before its next meeting in Mexico in December 2010.
Almost 20 years ago the Rio Earth Summit first focused attention on the environmental damage human activity was causing the planet, though from as far back as the Stockholm Environmental Conference 1972 many of the problems had been on the inernational agenda.
Ms Figueres has a lot to do, much of it very quickly. Most urgent will be to rebuild confidence in the UN negotiation process before the Mexico summit and to try to focus delegates' attention on the increasing urgency of the task of reaching global agreement on action.
The UN's third Global Biodiversity Outlook report is the latest example of the almost-daily new horror stories emerging this one saying that some ecosystems may soon reach tipping points which could include rapid dieback of forests, algae taking over water courses and mass coral reef death which, it warns, could soon begin to impact on national economies.
Actually it's economics that are at the heart of the climate change disagreements. They are listed in a discussion on the BBC's website by Maurice Strong, who was secretary general of the 1972 Swedish conference, and Felix Dodds, Executive Director of Stakeholder Forum.
They say that human societies are living beyond the planet's carrying capacity, with climate change emerging as an out-of-control driver of many of the world's environmental and economic crises.
One example of what this means to individual citizens is that basic needs like food have become ever more expensive as food scarcity threatens, particularly in developing countries. At the same time "green" consumers in the developed world are increasingly demanding natural, healthier food.
All this puts even greater pressure on the land to increase farm food production to feed a growing global population.
Food production is a good example of the way in which economics and the environment are intimately connected and impact on the climate change debate.
As part of their strategy to tackle environmental issues and climate change governments could invest in and agree globally on regulation to speed up the introduction of the new generation of low-chem, environmentally friendly agricultural products being created by Biopesticides Developers that could enable farmers to increase their land's yield sustainably and meet the demand for affordable healthy food. While some do, they are not nearly enough and not in harmony with each other.
It all boils down to the competitive nature of the outdated economic model of continuous growth as the means to deliver fairness and prosperity to the disadvantaged that virtually all national governments still place their faith in.
Yet, as the global economic crisis should have warned us, it's plainly failed to deliver while the gap between rich and poor has grown despite governments' efforts.
The continuous growth model has been questioned since at least 1993, by Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend (Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem), by the Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, founder of the microcredit movement known as Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.
In the UK in 2009 Prof Tim Jackson, Economics Commissioner for the Sustainable Development Commission, wrote that a macro-economy depending on continual expansion of debt-driven materialistic consumption is ecologically unsustainable, socially problematic and economically unstable.
So Ms Figueres faces another, equally urgent challenge in Mexico - to get the world's leaders to focus on changing the unsustainable economic models that are threatening the environment and human survival.
It's to be hoped that a woman, and one from a smaller developing country, may be able to bring a new perspective and understanding that will finally shift the entrenched positions between developed, developing and emerging national economies that have brought the annual climate change negotiations to stalemate.