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The Hague Declaration on Planetary Security - Interview with Alexander Carius

"We are here at the third edition of the Planetary Security Conference. I think what they have achieved over the past couple of years is bringing a community of practice to The Hague on an annual basis and exchanging what we have learned and what we have done in the past and getting together and developing new programmes and initiatives.

We came up with the Planetary Security declaration – The Hague Declaration – on that subject that contains 6 areas of action. It is a non-binding document but I think it is a document that countries will commit to. Many have signed, international organisations have signed up to that. It is basically asking for giving an institutional home to the debate of climate and security and the Swedish Government sitting as a non-permanent member in the Security Council, I think, raised the level of ambition in making very concrete on what that means and they have a couple of suggestions that they are discussing with the Secretary General at the moment.

There are other recommendations of sustainable livelihood development, water and peace, integrated risk assessments that are a little bit more vague. Countries are encouraged really to support these kinds of initiatives, all of them are important, but I would wish for the future, in next years’ conferences that countries will make concrete commitments on how they are going to support these initiatives. And I think that when it comes to assessment – this is one of the things that we have learned here – it is not so much knowledge, it is not so much the evidence that we are missing but it’s designing our policies in a way that they can capture the complexity of issues and turn this into very concrete programmes and projects on the ground."

Directed by: Stella Schaller (adelphi). Produced by: Paul-Müller Hahl (Lichtbilder Filmproduktion).