For decades, climate change was addressed as an extension of a technical environmental debate managed by expert committees and shaped by the reports of international organizations. Today, however, this very approach seems to be part of the problem rather than the solution. The issue is no longer limited to setting development priorities or improving air quality; it has become a question of the very limits of the planet’s sustainability under the current pattern of production and consumption.
I do not lean toward pessimism or exaggeration, but the most urgent and critical reality today is that the effects of this crisis are no longer merely future concerns; they are already threatening people’s daily livelihoods, food prices, and urban stability, in addition to water security and increasingly widespread patterns of forced migration. Despite this, a large part of public policy continues to treat climate change as a secondary or elite issue that can be managed gradually, while field indicators and the increasingly strained reality of the planet indicate that the available time window is shrinking at lightning speed.
After decades of conferences and agreements, a severe gap between rhetoric and reality has become evident. Recent United Nations reports clearly indicate that emissions must be reduced radically and immediately; otherwise, the world faces a future where habitability itself is under threat. Yet international commitments remain timid, lacking effective enforcement mechanisms where pledges are announced, only to vanish at the first test of the profit-and-loss equation.
There is a deficiency in perception, as the global economic system still treats the environment as an external factor, one that is not accurately incorporated into the financial equation. Environmental damage, carbon emissions, and biodiversity losses all remain off the books, or are only partially recorded in ways that fail to reflect their reality. In the absence of strict environmental accountability, the crisis becomes a structural inability to recognize the true cost of what is happening. During my chairmanship of a UN team tasked with setting standards for environmental accounting and reporting, it became clear from an early stage that the crisis was not a lack of knowledge, but rather the absence of binding mechanisms that turn knowledge into a measurable and enforceable commitment. The recurring motto in those discussions was that “What gets measured gets managed”. However, what was not stated clearly enough is that what does not get measured is also left without accountability, and without a real, immediate cost.