It was with real sadness that we learned on Friday that our great colleague, Maurice Strong had passed away.
The timing is poignant, given that Maurice – who was in a real sense the founding father of international cooperation on the environment and sustainable development – had placed such importance on a successful result from the Climate Change negotiations that opened in Paris three days later.
Indeed, the UN Convention on Climate Change counts as one of, if not the most, significant and concrete achievements of the fabled 1992 Earth Summit in Rio – a conference that Strong planned, built, strategised and shepherded to unanimous agreement on an astonishing array of policy areas.
The Earth Summit was the first to integrate environment, economic and social issues. Besides climate, it produced the Agenda 21, Convention on Biological Diversity, the Rio Declaration, and resulted in the Convention on Desertification and the UN Commission on Sustainable Development.
Strong led an astonishingly varied professional life: energy company CEO, head of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), first executive director of UNEP, secretary-general of the UN conferences at Stockholm (1972) and at Rio, NGO founder, author, president of the council of the UN University for Peace, and professor at Peking University.
Perhaps it was that ability to thrive in sectors that often are seen as in opposition to each other, that helped inform one of his most valuable contributions – the opening of UN negotiating processes to the active participation of a wide range of stakeholder representatives.
In the run-up to the Summit he approached stakeholders in a way which would change intergovernmental negotiations forever. Instead of focusing solely on governments he decided to conduct a three-year campaign that would demand the overlapping participation of five simultaneously dynamic universes of actors. In what amounted to a diplomatic three-ring circus, he travelled the world appearing at a non-stop sequence of hearings, PrepComs, panel discussions, private audiences, press conferences and interviews.
In each capital he visited, he would speak not only with the government’s executive officials, but also its parliamentarians, business people, its local authorities, its academics, its journalists and its NGOs. He told each that there would be a place for them at the table, and that its participation was essential not only for the success of the negotiations, but for implementation after the results were agreed.
The result was that all attended; in numbers that were unprecedented for an international summit. And the public momentum they created made it almost impossible for political leaders to stand in the way of agreements.
It seems impossible to think that he is no longer with us. That we will not have his good counsel when we lose our way. Those who had the good fortune to work with him will miss his breadth of knowledge, his political creativity, his intrepid determination, his advice, and simply the reassuring knowledge that there was someone who could see the big picture – with all its challenges, obstacles and potential – and who could almost always find a way to navigate through them. His unwavering commitment to sustainability, to the environment and to multilateralism will be difficult to fill.
In his last speech that he was prepared to give to the UN General Assembly in September 2014 but in the end could not give, he warmed us about the challenge of Paris:
“We need in Paris next year a strong climate agreement, but I worry that will not be possible because of the political reality here in the United States. No issue is more important to the human future than that of climate change, in which the political will to act cooperatively and decisively has dangerously diminished.
“Indeed, it has never been more important to heed the evidence of science that time is running out. We must rise above concerns that preempt our attention and respond to the reality that the future of human life on Earth depends on what we do, or fail to do in this generation.
“Our essential unity as peoples of the Earth must transcend the differences and difficulties which still divide us. You are called upon to rise to your historic responsibility as custodians of the planet in taking the decisions in the next year that will unite rich and poor, north, south, east and west, in a new global partnership to ensure our common future. The time has come for action.”
It is up to Heads of State to take up his call in the next two weeks. There couldn’t be a better way of celebrating the life of Maurice Strong than securing a great deal in Paris on climate change.
We had the honour to work with him on his last book Only One Earth:
The Long Road via Rio to Sustainable Development. Besides the obvious professional debt, our personal thanks go to him, for the lessons learned from years of observing – up close or from a distance, sometimes as rivals but usually as friends, always with awe and admiration.
Our thoughts are with Maurice, wherever he may now be. We suspect it is in a higher, more peaceful, and continually sustainable place.
Felix Dodds is an author and a senior fellow at the University of North Carolina Global Research Institute and an associate fellow at the Tellus Institute. Michael Strauss is the executive director of Earth Media, an independent political and communications consultancy based in New York
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