Thank you very much, Chair.
Good morning to you and to other members of the committee. Thank you very much for this opportunity to appear before you.
My name is Malini Mehra. I am the chief executive of GLOBE International, which is the world's largest network of national legislators devoted to legislative leadership on climate change and sustainable development. I am, however, speaking today in a personal capacity, drawing on almost three decades of experience in working on sustainable development in different sectors and in different countries, including my home country of India.
Having worked in the NGO community and inside the United Nations, as well as at the heart of central government in the U.K. and at the top of global companies on these issues—and now with legislative leaders from around the world—I would like to offer a perspective that cuts across traditional silos and perhaps brings some new facts and exciting trends to the attention of your review process.
This is the third time that the Federal Sustainable Development Act of 2008 has been reviewed. I presume that the object of the exercise is to assess whether it is still fit for purpose, or whether certain aspects, such as existing priorities or institutional arrangements, need to be revisited.
I assume the review process is also an important opportunity to reconnect with the public on these issues, like a renewal of one's marriage vows, reaffirming the fundamental social contract between the government and the people to secure sustainable development through democratic engagement for the benefit of current and future generations.
This fitness for purpose and democratic engagement for effective implementation are core themes that I'd like to address. I believe that your review process of the Federal Sustainable Development Act offers an excellent opportunity to modernize the approach and practice of governance for sustainable development to make it more fit for purpose in the post-2015 world.
I submit that modernization for the post-2015 world, with greater democratic engagement and accountability, should be an approach for this committee to consider. I do so for the following three reasons.
Firstly, we now have more than a generation of experience of “doing” sustainable development, from Local Agenda 21 to full-blown sustainable development acts and frameworks across countries. We have a good idea of what works and what doesn't, and it's time to learn from these lessons and apply them. You've just heard from Peter Davies an excellent example of lessons learned and applied in Wales.
Secondly, last year changed everything. Not only was 2015 the hottest year on record, it also represented an unprecedented coming together of a host of UN summits on disaster risk management, gender equality, finance for development, sustainable development goals, and of course, climate change. All these set a very clear agenda for 2030, but the flight path will have to be set by governments.
In Sendai, Addis, New York, and Paris, the world's governments adopted new global agreements that will set the course of government policy for the next 15 years. This is not a pick-and-mix approach. The 2015 summits require a holistic whole-of-government mindset and will require changes to governance. At GLOBE International, we are promoting an integrated approach to the implementation of the 2015 agreements, which we term “the convergence and coherence approach”.
Thirdly and finally, two important new trends are present and visible: firstly, an increased role of non-state actors in public mobilization and in solution design and delivery, including through coalitions; and secondly, greater transparency and disclosure, including through big data releases—we've seen some of those recently—and social media.
These trends are resetting norms around public specialist discourse and expectation on these issues. For example, the Paris agreement was a very atypical, very modern piece of international diplomacy and policy-making, bringing in non-state actors for the first time. There are now more than 4,000 registered commitments on climate action from companies, cities, subnational regions, and investors that will make gigatonnes of difference to global greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Could this be one of the game-changers that helps us to keep global emissions below the much tougher 1.5 degree Celsius goal set by the Paris agreement?
Chair, this is the new modern context of politics and policy-making. How will governments and this committee respond to this challenge? That is the question.
Thank you. Those are my opening remarks. I look to more detail in the discussion to follow.