Planetary Institutions

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Planetary Institutions

Jonathan Zawada:

"Blake and Gilman also propose “planetary institutions for planetary issues.” As illustrative cases, they call for a “Planetary Atmospheric Steward” (PAS) and a “Planetary Pandemics Agency” (PPA).

PAS would conjoin with and enhance the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s function of increasing knowledge of the climate, including by utilizing AI’s data processing capacity and fostering new monitory technologies and sensors, availing all national, regional and local levels of governance of the information they’ve gathered to stand behind its “authority to make and enforce decisions on limiting carbon emissions on the basis of what it knows.”

The authors make this controversial point clear: “The PAS would have the authority to set hard targets for net greenhouse gas emissions — not suggestions or aspirations, but enforceable rules. The PAS’s decisions on greenhouse gas emissions won’t be optional: they will have to be obeyed and implemented by governance institutions at all scales. The principle of planetary subsidiarity guides the allocation of decision rights: the planetary institution sets the targets, national states decide how to handle the political-economic implications, and localities decide on the implementation details.”

Like the PAS, the PPA’s first task would be information gathering, not unlike today’s World Health Organization. It would “monitor human/animal and human/wilderness interfaces everywhere, including sites of deforestation and habitat destruction, the trade in wildlife, and industrial livestock, as well as regions with heavy antibiotic usage.”

A second role for the PPA is to act on its knowledge by making decisions to reduce the risks of disease emergence among humans by preventing the spillover of pathogens from animals and the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant microbes. This, in the author’s design, “requires the planetary institution to adopt a holistic perspective on human health, taking action to promote the health of animals, ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole. Only by taking action upstream of human infection can the PPA prevent epidemics from happening in the first place.”

The PPA’s third and most contentious role would involve centralized decision-making and coordination in the event of a pandemic or possible pandemic. The institution’s remit would include not only the ability to declare a “planetary public health emergency,” but also “the authority to set standards for national and local pandemic defense plans and to mandate when sub-planetary institutions should invoke these plans.”

Beyond all this, the PPA would take the lead in developing, producing and distributing vaccines and therapeutics for worldwide use."

(Noema, April 2024)