The Solar Impulse plane is completely powered by the sun, after a succesful mission crossing the United States, the plane is now making its way around the world. Green Cross International is a partner, hear more from our President, Alexander Likhotal:

 

The world is facing unprecedented challenges. Expanding opportunities are emerging side-by-side with intensifying problems. A proliferation of links between money, technology, energy, education, trade and communication is fueling ever more rapid global development. Growing global capacities to meet human needs have come face-to-face with insurmountable difficulties.

 

Persistent poverty coexists with unprecedented prosperity. Rising levels of inequality and unemployment are spreading discontent and social unrest, while an aging population is straining social welfare nets. Economic growth is rapidly depleting the world's natural resources and threatening catastrophic climate change. Competition for scarce resources is aggravating nationalist competition at a time when international cooperation is needed for coping with common global challenges. Globalization is breaking down the barriers insulating national economies, increasing the vulnerability of States to destabilizing cross-border impacts. Proliferation of nuclear and other weapons poses new threats to national and regional security.

 

Humanity seems driven by mutually exclusive and contradictory goals leading to apparently insoluble problems.

Governments rare not taking the perilous challenges posed by climate change and achieving sustainable and equitable development seriously. Short-term national and financial concerns are taking top priority, while resource use is escalating.

 

Urgent action is needed on the structural, fundamental causes of the deteriorating situation, primarily excessive consumption, waste and the current unsustainable model of economic growth. This requires transformational change. But we have mainly seen rhetoric and political grandstanding on change. We must walk the talk.

Actions from one organization alone cannot change the world. We must work together. Awe-inspiring initiatives like Solar Impulse show people that it is possible to dream about a future driven by clean, renewable energy. Innovators like Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg embody sustainability through their work with airplanes capable of crossing the United States of America fuelled just by sun rays. Their coming around-the-world challenge will no doubt instill millions of people with hope for the future and demonstrate how we humans can take revolutionary actions today that can sustain us into the future.

 

This is why a partnership between Solar Impulse and Green Cross makes sense. Working together, and with our many other partners, we can play our own unique, yet related, roles in a coordinated way to achieve one common goal: to transform and preserve our world through sustainability.

Nothing less than a revolution is needed in how we use natural resources. Our economy requires a fundamental transformation within a generation - in energy, industry, agriculture, fisheries and transport systems, plus producer and consumer behaviour.

 

When I joined Green Cross, shortly after its 1993 founding, I knew we had a long battle ahead to influence change in the values of people, business and government, and to turn sustainability into a development pillar.

This is taking hold, but slowly. President Obama is committing to fight climate change. Europe is championing green energy. China has de-facto recognized its development must be sustainable. The UN adopted the right to water as a human right. Oil multinationals, car manufacturers and chemical companies are parading their environmental credentials. Pollution, climate change and the depletion of natural resources have replaced nuclear weapons as the existential threats keeping voters awake.

 

There is awareness and many examples of required actions being undertaken by companies, governments and individuals. But this must be stepped up, and governments must incentivize the expansion of circular economic and business models, green and smart energy and technologies.

 

Alexander Likhotal
President, Green Cross International

Viewed at: http://info.solarimpulse.com/timeline/view/7367#.VX0FOuu6xTo