LEAVES 27 (3) - March 2025

        Newsletter of the
         INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENT FORUM
         Volume 27, Number 3 --- 15 March 2025    

Website: iefworld.org
Article submission: newsletter@iefworld.org Deadline next issue 10 April 2024
Secretariat Email: ief@iefworld.org Christine Muller General Secretary 
Postal address: 12B Chemin de Maisonneuve, CH-1219 Chatelaine, Geneva, Switzerland
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From the Editor, Request for information for upcoming newsletters

This newsletter is an opportunity for IEF members to share their experiences, activities, and  initiatives that are taking place at the community level on environment, climate change  and sustainability. All members are welcome to contribute information about related  activities, upcoming conferences, news from like-minded organizations, recommended  websites, book reviews, etc. Please send information to newsletter@iefworld.org.

Please share the Leaves newsletter and IEF membership  information with family, friends and associates, and encourage interested persons to consider  becoming a member of the IEF.

IEF Webinar

Global biodiversity patterns, spiritual values, and transformative change 

Speaker: Cedric Åkermark 

Sunday, April 6 
10am PDT (California) 
1pm EDT (New York) 
6pm GMT (UK) 
6pm WAT Abuja, Nigeria) 
7pm CEST (Europe) 
8pm EAT (Nairobi, Kenya) 

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/IEF-IBPES  

Cedric had the opportunity to represent IEF at the IPBES (Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) Youth Workshop in Namibia in December 2024. 
IPBES is working on assessing knowledge of global biodiversity patterns and supporting policy making in addressing the challenges that biodiversity and ecosystem services are facing. Cedric will share some of the important messages of key IPBES assessments. He will also discuss how the Writings and guidance of the Bahá'í Faith relate to these messages, and we will together reflect on how we can contribute to the discourse on biodiversity and ecosystem services. 

Bio: As a PhD student, Cedric Åkermark researches how aquatic biodiversity in forest ecosystems is affected by forest management and climate change, focusing on biodiversity in natural streams, ditches, and "dreams" (modified streams or naturalized ditches) using eDNA metabarcoding. With increasing climate pressures and forestry impacts, his work aims to improve understanding of biodiversity patterns, the effects of extreme hydrological events, and how to enhance future monitoring efforts. Cedric has been a member of IEF since 2022, and through his engagement in IEF he has been able to find connections between his academic interests and some of his core values such as the oneness of humankind and the harmony between science and religion.

IEF Matters

IEF Youth Gathering 
The latest IEF youth gathering was held on 8 March 2025. The youth studied a summary of the BIC Statement One Planet, One Habitation which discusses how humanity can redefine its relationship with nature. The group was small, but the discussion was substantive and very interesting. The participants were enthusiastic about their gathering and want to meet again soon. 

Volunteer needed to help with IEF Website organization! 
The IEF website is a treasure of many resources – so many that they are often not easy to find! The IEF Board is looking for an IEF member or associate who could advise on better organization. This could be someone with a library science background, a website designer, or someone who just has organizational skills and the interest to make the IEF website more user friendly. Please, contact the IEF secretariat: IEF@IEFworld.org 

IEF Collaboration with other Organisations

UN Charter Reform Coalition 
The International Environment Forum joined the UN Charter Reform Coalition as a supporting member. The UN Charter Reform Coalition is a growing global movement to reform and revitalize the United Nations through a general conference as anticipated in Article 109 of the UN Charter. 

International Partner Network of the UNESCO Chair on Education for Sustainable Lifestyles 
The International Environment Forum also decided to continue its participation as an institutional member of the International Partner Network of the UNESCO Chair on Education for Sustainable Lifestyles, a network initiated by Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. The objectives of the UNESCO Chair on ESL align with IEF’s initiatives to promote and strengthen education and learning for sustainable development. 

The network includes over forty educational institutions around the world. The network maintains a website of teaching materials and resources, that include the Values-based Learning toolkits that IEF helped to develop. The link to the website is https://www.inn.no/english/ccl/teaching-materials-and-resources/index.html. 

UNESCO, that sponsors the Chair, has its own page of sites as learning hubs for sustainability: https://www.unesco.org/en/sustainable-development/education/sites. Another partner in the network features Global Lessons on Greening School Grounds and Outdoor Learning: https://www.childrenandnature.org/schoolgroundgreening/.

As we are shocked every day by new headlines about our disintegrating civilisation, I struggle to apply complex systems science and my Bahá’í spiritual values to understand the driving forces behind these events. A combination of recent sources in the last month have each shed some light on this challenging question. The leading experts on post-growth economics have prepared a joint review on the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries (see my summary at https://iefworld.org/post-growth2025). The leading American climate scientist and his colleagues have documented how global warming has suddenly accelerated, making tipping points to climate catastrophe unavoidable (https://iefworld.org/node/1676), while the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries has estimated that climate change impacts will reduce global GDP by 50 percent by 2070-2090 (https://iefworld.org/node/1669). A leading UN expert has just published a book on complex systems science for adaptive global governance facing accelerating complexity which I have reviewed and summarised (https://iefworld.org/Dahl_forever). Then I participated in a meeting of leading specialists on global environmental governance, including that expert, with enlightened reflections on global diplomacy today.

It has been clear to me for some time that the rise of autocrats and populist movements on the political extremes is the result of the materialistic neoliberal economic system, whether capitalist or communist, emphasising greed and power. The system profits from and manipulates the anger, frustration and hate of the majority of the world population that see wealth increasingly concentrated at the top while their own living standards and well-being have declined in recent decades, often trapping them in poverty. Political leaders both defend the interests of the winners in the system that enable them to stay in power, and promote scapegoats like immigrants to deflect the anger of the losers. The actors in this system, through lobbying and corruption, control most governments and undermine democracy to protect their short-term interests, while doing all they can to deny the science and resist efforts to control climate change and protect the environment.

The same driving force is behind the diplomatic failures of the climate change, biodiversity and pollution regimes. The same anger felt by individuals against the economic system that subjugates them is also reflected in the position of most Global South countries that continue to be victimised through their economic colonisation by high-income countries and their corporate emissaries that appropriate materials, energy, land and labour through traded goods while depressing their prices and draining the South of its productive capacities. For many leaders in the Global South, any mention of the environment, planetary concerns, halting fossil fuel or mineral extraction, saving biodiversity or strengthening global governance just seems like a cover-up to prevent them from developing like the Global North.

It is thus the economic system with its profound injustices that is behind the fragmentation and growing conflict both within and between countries. Attempts to improve the institutions of governance or to alleviate other symptoms of this problem are bound to fail as long as such injustice continues. Indeed, complex systems science that describes how systems evolve shows that increasing inequality is a sign of a system on the way to chaos and catastrophic collapse.

What is encouraging is to also discover forces of integration. Leading scientists researching these issues are coming to conclusions close to the values of the Bahá’í Faith. In December 2024, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) approved its Transformative Change Assessment (https://iefworld.org/IPBEStransformative) showing that transformative change requires fundamental system-wide shifts in views – ways of thinking, knowing and seeing; structures – ways of organizing, regulating and governing; and practices – ways of doing, behaving and relating. It defines the drivers of environmental destruction as the disconnection of people from nature and their domination over nature and other people; the inequitable concentration of power and wealth; and the prioritization of short-term individual and material gains. The report identifies four principles to guide deliberate transformative change: equity and justice; pluralism and inclusion; respectful and reciprocal human-nature relationships; and adaptive learning and action. These are so close to Bahá’í principles, yet come from a scientific body.

Continue reading this article here: https://iefworld.org/Dahl_disintegration 

Transformative Change: A Bahá’í Perspective on the IPBES Assessment

The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) issued its Transformative Change Assessment in 2024 that makes science-based recommendations on how to transform society fundamentally to protect biodiversity and become sustainable. Arthur Lyon Dahl Ph.D., President of the International Environment Forum, prepared a compilation that shows how this expert scientific view is completely compatible with Bahá’í principles. It follows the outline of the assessment’s Summary for Policymakers. This compilation is now available on the website of IF20.

Latest Warnings on Climate Change

The Global Governance Forum has published on its website on 3 March 2025 a new blog by IEF President Arthur Dahl on Latest Warnings on Climate Change. It can be viewed at https://globalgovernanceforum.org/latest-warnings-on-climate-change/. Much of the content has come from earlier postings on the IEF website.

World’s climate fight needs fundamental reform

The international effort to avert climate catastrophe has become mired by misinformation and bad faith actors, and must be fundamentally reformed, according to a leading UN climate expert.

Elisa Morgera, the UN special rapporteur on climate change, said the annual UN climate summits and the consensus-based, state-driven process is dominated by powerful forces pushing false narratives and by tech fixes that divert attention from real, equitable solutions for the countries least responsible and most affected.

Read the article here: https://iefworld.org/node/1664 

Is our Vision of Progress Really Progress?

Here are some excerpts from this article:

How do we envision progress? Do we equate it with GDP growth and per-capita income relative to our geopolitical rivals? Do we equate it with growing market capitalization and market share relative to our industry competitors? Do we equate it with personal wealth, status, and prestige relative to our colleagues, peers, and neighbors? …

The modern order offers phenomenal material spoils to a select few, but offers little protection from countless threats and harms. From the effects of climate change, microplastics, toxic chemicals, misinformation, exploitation, capture of attention, poverty, mass shootings—the list is virtually inexhaustible. The present order is willing to expose us to all of those harms, again and again, in exchange for the opportunity to accumulate profit. …

Unmooring ourselves from dominant notions of progress will not be simple. It will require rethinking many dominant assumptions. For example, can progress for just a few be considered progress at all? If wealth is concentrated in those select few, does it contribute to the wealth of a society? But increasing numbers of people are questioning our trajectory at this fundamental level, asking what it is that should be motivating our behavior. …

What is true progress? If we focus our attention on this question, we might be surprised to find the kinds of answers that emerge from caring families, trusting neighborhoods, healthy communities: like love, service, and relationship. We might be able to build new economies around these values, rather than current values of accumulation, wealth, and victory.

Moving in this direction would require sacrifice on the part of all involved; we should be honest about this point. Certain regions, like North America and Western Europe, would have to question their comfortable position of being “winners” of the modern global order. Many other areas would need to give up long-held and deeply-cherished aspirations of enjoying, in their own right, those same enticements of affluence and consumption.

Go here to read the full article: https://iefworld.org/BIC_Perell2025 

IEF member Monica Maghami has just published on 5 February 2025 an excellent paper "New Global Governance and Overarching Frameworks: Reimagining the Rule of Law, AI and ESG for the Betterment of the World" in the Denning Law Journal.

ABSTRACT:
The advancement of digital technologies, particularly in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the geopolitical fragmentation of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) with a lack of mandatory international governance, calls for increased global cooperation and integration in overarching central conceptual and action frameworks. As humanity faces critical environmental challenges — such as climate extremes and biodiversity loss and wars — the disparities between rich and poor become more evident and the planet displays its illness. Addressing these challenges requires collective social change, underpinned by shared operating systems, open-source models, and quality data. Humanity’s fragmented relationship with nature highlights the need for a robust global governance system. As AI and ESG matters transcend national borders, there is a growing need for international frameworks, such as the involvement of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to resolve disputes and the rule of law, both at national and international levels to be interconnected, ensuring that legal frameworks complement each other. A shift toward “sust-AI-nability,” grounded in human reason, science- and fact-based, with values- and risk-based must coordinate cooperation, essential for managing global challenges, foster meaningful transformation, and advance the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

SOURCE: https://www.ubplj.org/index.php/dlj/article/view/2353 
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5750/dlj.v33i1.2353 

One of the issues in science as it is practiced today is access to the results of scientific research. As with so much in the neoliberal economy, much scientific knowledge has been privatised as intellectual property and protected by copyright, not in the interest of the original author but to generate profits for the academic publishers. The most prestigious journals are owned by a small number of multinational corporate publishers, and academic libraries pay high subscription charges to give their institutional researchers access, while professional societies use their membership fees to support their own journals. In both cases, if you do not have access to an academic library or a society membership, you must pay a considerable sum, say $30-50, to read each paper. There is no time limit on this protection. As a retired scientist, I cannot read my own publications online, or even articles my grandfather wrote more than a hundred years ago, without paying separately for access to each one.

This raises the question of whether access to knowledge should be a human right. Should scientific knowledge be available only to the rich who can afford it? Knowledge is not something that is consumed when it is shared; on the contrary it becomes more valuable to society the more it is applied. Printed journals have costs to cover for paper, printing and delivery, but online costs are negligible. The founder of the Bahá'í Faith, Bahá'u'lláh, said that "Knowledge is as wings to man's life, and a ladder for his ascent. Its acquisition is incumbent upon everyone." This would suggest that there should be no barrier in access to knowledge.

There is a growing movement to make the scientific literature "open source", that is available to anyone free of charge. The Frontiers Research Foundation is circulating an open letter calling for the world's science to be unlocked by making it open source. This can be accessed and signed at https://www.frontiersfoundation.org/open-science-charter. What is still missing in this initiative is to make scientific publishing accessible even to the poor in the global South, where there is much knowledge and experience from which the whole world could benefit, but without the means to make it available.

Ideally, scientific research should be a capacity open to everyone, and each local community should develop this at its own level. Sharing that wisdom and experience around the world will help to build an ever-advancing civilisation.

The Forever Crisis: Adaptive Global Governance

Adam Day. 2025. The Forever Crisis: Adaptive Global Governance for an Era of Accelerating Complexity. London and New York: Routledge. 184 p.

You can read a comprehensive book review and summary by IEF President Arthur Lyon Dahl here: https://iefworld.org/Dahl_forever 

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) has posted in its latest newsletter an excellent summary of recent work on measures of progress and wellbeing "Beyond GDP: Integrating New Approaches in Global Frameworks". It can be consulted at https://sdg.iisd.org/news/beyond-gdp-integrating-new-approaches-in-glob…

We can hope that this excellent work may finally lead to some real progress in influencing policy-making, which is still trapped in the GDP framework.

UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), in its Economic Development in Africa Report 2024, says that the world is in polycrisis, and Africa is on the front line of exposure. The complex global polycrisis encompasses climate-related, economic, political and technological challenges. The interconnectedness of vulnerabilities, intensified by geopolitical tensions and climate change, poses significant risks to the continent. However, Africa also possesses unique strengths, such as a young population, significant natural resources and growing regional markets and investment opportunities.

A variety of interconnected external shocks, such as geopolitical conflicts, the war in Ukraine, the global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and inflationary pressures, have disrupted supply chains, increased costs and magnified vulnerabilities worldwide, and hit African economies hard. These shocks interact with the vulnerable socioeconomic and political structures in Africa, creating unique challenges to sustainable development. Reliance on foreign markets, volatile commodity exports, high debt and weak infrastructure have deepened the continent’s vulnerabilities.

For instance, in 2022, climate-related hazards in Africa caused $8.5 billion in damages, affecting over 110 million people. Climate change poses existential risks, particularly in agriculture-dependent economies. Severe weather events and environmental degradation threaten food security, livelihoods and economic stability. Countries with inadequate climate adaptation policies face intensified challenges from extreme weather and environmental degradation, which limits the ability to cope with crises.

In addition, in Africa, with less than 50 per cent of the population having reliable access to electricity and given a reliance on fossil fuels and the significant barriers faced in the energy transition, vulnerability to global energy price shocks is intensified. Most countries in Africa lack the infrastructure to harness hydro, solar or wind power. Building renewable energy capacity in order to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels and securing international funding for sustainable energy projects are critical for transformation and resilience in Africa; $190 billion is needed annually for energy investment, equal to 6.1 per cent of GDP of Africa.

The report emphasizes the need to promote sustainable development. African economies can strengthen resilience to trade risks caused by interconnected shocks across political, economic, energy, technological and climate fronts. There is an urgent need to diversify economies, integrate high-value supply chains and improve business conditions, especially for smaller firms.

SOURCE: based on https://unctad.org/publication/economic-development-africa-report-2024 

In full partnership: Women’s advancement as a prerequisite for peaceful societies

The Bahá'í International Community issued a statement to the 69th session of the Commission on the Status of Women on 20 February 2025. You can read the statement here: https://iefworld.org/2025bic_csw 

This is an excerpt: The advancement of women is a prerequisite for peaceful and prosperous societies. It is an objective that must be embraced if we are to bring about a harmonious future that goes beyond the cessation of violence. Yet, the 12 critical areas of concern articulated in Beijing, devised to support women’s full development and equality with men, are still to be adequately addressed. Hard-won gains are eroding as patriarchal norms embedded in the systems and structures of societies resurge with harmful effects for women and men alike. Indeed, history has demonstrated that institutional reforms remain tenuous and vulnerable to shifts in power and priorities if they are not accompanied by a more enduring transformation within individual mindsets and social norms.

Reflections on Information

Information as a concept and currency 

We talk a lot about information and an information society, with artificial intelligence one of the recent manifestations, and giant enterprises capturing and using information to maximise their profits. One particular challenge is that information, when abstracted from its uses, is essentially intangible. It is independent of the platform on which it is stored and the means of its transmission. Take language, for example. It can be spoken, written down, printed in a book, digitized and communicated over the Internet as an image of letters and words or as spoken sound, but the meaning is independent of any of these.

Information can also be static or dynamic. The former is like written text in a book, available and preserved as long as the book exists and its language is still understood. But in this form it has no impact. When someone reads the book, the information is transferred into the brain and consciousness of the reader, where it can have an impact and be used, performing some service or inspiring and guiding some behaviour.

From the perspective of the science of systems, information is what determines how the system is organized, how its components fit together, communicate and interact, and how it evolves and maintains itself dynamically over time. It can have different roles and operate at different scales, from the information enshrined in atoms that determines how they combine into molecules, to the values that determine what is just or unjust in a society.

Information in this broad sense is at the heart of all human development and organization. It is the foundation of civilization, and more advanced civilizations have much greater information content. Therefore considering in some rational way the amount of information in each component of society, how it is mobilized and used in the functioning of the social system, and whether it is growing and contributing to social progress, or regressing and being lost, would describe an essential element of what is necessary for human well-being.

Human information can take many forms and have different purposes. Science, for example, is the accumulation of information about the physical universe, the natural world, the principles of physics, chemistry, biology, medicine and our own physical and psychological functioning, as well as tools of science such as mathematics and computer programming. Language is another tool we have created to communicate, record and preserve human information, to tell stories, describe history, and transmit thoughts, ideas and feelings in literature, for example. Art is another way to share information, whether a representational picture or sculpture or a more abstract sharing of emotion or a sense of beauty that resonates in others. Cave paintings are some of the earliest records of human information communicated through art to have survived. Music transmits information of another kind, including emotions, through our sense of hearing. Then there is the information on capacities of the human body encoded in sports or dance, which communicate in their own way. All of the manual crafts and skills are also forms of information on the ways an individual worker can contribute something to society. The institutions of society are another expression of information, whether in the structures and processes of governance, the ways to execute economic activities, and all the ways that humans organize and the laws, rules of behaviour and values that underly human interactions. The scope of information for the human species places us at the apex of evolution of life as we know it.

Perhaps the most fundamental level of human information, although often underappreciated today, is that in religious scriptures or traditions, which have provided the principles and values for each major stage in the evolution of human society. Whether in the world’s major religions or in the world-views and conceptions of indigenous peoples, these revolutionary concepts can usually be traced back to unique figures who all claim to have received their message from a greater reality beyond themselves, and to be simple instruments for its transmission, generally at great personal cost. At least in their initial pure form, they have represented a creative force for social and individual progress from families to tribes, city states, nations, and now to a global community, as most recently demonstrated in the Bahá’í Faith.