Page 19 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

will have a most dangerous impact on a global level. I believe, however, that we
must view the results that have been attained with optimism. In fact COP21
was the opportunity for at least two changes in direction from the point of
view of the general approach to the problem.

Principles, perhaps prejudices, that were firmly established in the diploma-
tic agenda of international debate, were set aside.

The first change regards the theme of “recapitulation” in the “north
against south” question, or rather that developing countries, having debts owed
to richer countries, could evade a commitment to mitigate the consequences
and risks of climate change. It is not that we have moved on to an idea of equal
commitment for everyone, which would be a mistake in the other extreme as
there is no doubt that the commitment of richer nations must be different to
that of developing countries, but the idea of a common commitment has been
accepted, albeit in differentiated forms. The 175 countries who signed the
agreement in New York accepted the idea that no-one, at this time, can evade
the commitment to contain and mitigate the consequences of climate change;
even the poorer countries in greatest difficulty must do so, although obviously
with the environmental financial support that the richer countries must provide
to make this common commitment possible.

The breakup of another fundamental pattern was the movement away
from the idea that the green economy or environmental constraints were a bur-
den, a form of conditioning, a negative factor, while it is ever more evident that
they are not only a necessity but also an extraordinary opportunity. I returned
yesterday from a meeting of many hours with the Foreign Minister and a dele-
gation of Chinese businessmen; I can assure you that the issue of the environ-
ment, for understandable reasons (the unbridled nature of development, urba-
nization and motorization in those countries) is at the centre of their attention.
So we can put into place our potential too, as Italy, the country of great know
how in the field of renewable energy, waste processing etc..

I said that it was a race against the clock, and so it is with regard to climate
change. We will have to contend with this in the coming years; if we do not
intervene to mitigate it a serious way, the relatively new phenomenon of climate
refugees coming from areas of the world where they have been forced to move

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