In celebration of International Women's Day, The People Speak asked 16 prominent women, including Her Majesty Queen Rania, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman, about the women who have inspired them. The site also includes an interactive feature where you can write about an inspiring woman from your own life.
Last week, the Scientific Expert Group on Climate Change and Sustainable Development released their final report, facilitated by the United Nations Foundation and the distinguished scientific society Sigma Xi. The report is a roadmap for global climate change and promotes a two-pronged strategy: avoiding the unmanageable (mitigation) and managing the unavoidable (adaptation).
Thomas Homer-Dixon, Director of the Trudeau Centre for the Study of Peace and Conflict at the University of Toronto, recently published a book, The Upside of Down, in which he delineates a set of "techtonic stresses," including the scarcity of oil and global climate change, that could cause "a catastrophic breakdown of national and global order" but also "open up extraordinary opportunities for creative, bold reform of our societies." I recently spoke to Thomas Homer-Dixon about his book, the complexity of an effective response to global climate change, and multilateralism.
This conflict, I think, highlights the profound shortcomings of the United Nations, and I suspect we might be further down the road of acting decisively, if it were not for the restrictions we allow the Security Council to impose upon us. And I think that ... in the United Nations, we're sort of guaranteed the lowest common denominator approach to genocide.
The response posited by former Senator Tim Wirth flipped the issue on its head and framed it in a way that should be of interest to those promoting a framework for responding quickly to the genocide.