A third Club de Madrid Member, the former President of the Republic of Ireland, Mary Robinson, took the floor via videoconference stressing that ‘we need to move from business as usual to a paradigm shift to address climate change challenges’. President Robinson pointed out that ‘SGD’s are key for the conversation that the Club de Madrid and Shared Societies Project is organizing today’ and poised a crucial question in her speech: ‘Do we have the imagination to support all countries to develop sustainable energy and leave no one behind?’
However it was Club de Madrid Member and former President of Costa Rica, Laura Chinchilla, who opened the working group with an intervention that tried to answer the question that summarizes the issues to be discussed: How can we achieve societies with inclusive, sustainable & resilient prosperity? Chinchilla made clear a few things we no longer believe in: the existance of a magic recipe; that growth or development can be achieved at the expense of human dignity or environmental sustainability; economic growth as the only or most accurate measure of well being. In sum, as Chinchilla said ‘a new vision for growth should be framed within broad parameters of human development, sustainability, and equality, which are non-negotiable’.
Chinchilla also talk about the experience of her own country, Costa Rica, and the practices implemented onl environmental sustainability and Shared Societies.
You can read here her full speach at the first Working Group on Enviromental Sustainability and Shared Societies.
Click here to see the list of participants
