Bhutan is doing its bit to save planet: PM

6 February 2010

Prime Minister Jigmi Y Thinley offered Gross National Happiness (GNH) as perhaps the panacea the world could adopt to address the planet’s environmental woes.

Delivering a keynote address at the 10th Delhi Summit for Sustainable Development (DSDS) on Friday, he painted a vivid imagery of the dying glaciers of the Himalayas and warned that the conventional GDP-based development model was fundamentally flawed.

He said the Himalayan peaks appeared “powerful, pure and pristine” the first time he saw them from the air in 1989. “It was easy to believe then that these were indeed the abode of the Gods,” he told a gathering of political leaders, environmentalists and sustainable development experts from around the world.

However, as he took the same route in recent years, the views were not as “evocative”. “Much of the range looked like a high wall of grey and jagged outcrop of rocks. The gods seem to have abandoned their home.”

The culprit for these ills, he said, was a world which operated on GDP-based development model, obsessed with an excessive desire to consume, and urged the gathering to rethink their understanding and meaning of wealth and prosperity in relation to human wellbeing.

Rethinking, he warned, would, however, call for a paradigm shift with huge ramifications, to the extent of upsetting the global economic arrangements and bringing about fundamental changes in the way international and national security, finance, politics and power were structured and conducted.

He asked, “Are we as nations, economies and as individuals, prepared to face uncertainties of such nature and magnitude?

“Life must go on and what better way to do so than to put the wayward cart on the same old track even though past events suggest that the next time the cart goes off track, it may destroy both the cart and what is in it.”

Citing ecological footprint analysis, Prime Minister pointed out that the global ecological footprint, roughly half the regenerative capacity of the planet in 1960, had crossed the critical threshold by the mid 1980s. In 2005, the demand exceeded supply by 30 percent, meaning the present generation had consumed its share of the planet’s resources and had begun depriving the future generations of their share.

“This begs for an alternative development model based on a correct notion of what constitutes human wellbeing,” he said. “As we reflect on this, we need to be mindfully clear that the planet simply does not have the capacity to sustain life for much longer if developing countries, with their larger populations, were to tread the same path that brought the North its level of affluence and lifestyle.”

Sustainable development, according to the prime minister, was a model for equilibrium between the supply and demand of resources and about inter-generational equity in terms of resource distribution but did not holistically address what really constitutes human well being which should be happiness.

He told the gathering that Bhutan had been guided for several decades by the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH). It was based on the belief that happiness can be best achieved through development that balances the needs of the body with those of the mind within a stable and sustainable environment.

“It stresses that material enrichment must not lead to spiritual impoverishment and that it must address emotional and psychological needs of the individual,” he said. “Above all, GNH requires that, since the single most important desire of all citizens is happiness, the endeavour of government must be to create conditions that would enable its citizens to pursue happiness.”

As such, the Bhutanese constitution required the state to promote GNH as an arbiter of public policies and plans. Thus the country had GNH and its four pillars which contained ecological, cultural, social, psychological and political as well as economic development.

Under its GNH policies, Bhutan must maintain a minimum forest cover of 60 percent, value the forest more for its ecological value than its commercial worth, and had pledged to always remain carbon negative. GNH values were also being implemented in the tourism, construction and industrial sectors.

“As I take my return flight across the Himalayas, I would like to be able to dream that the gods will return to their abode and that my grand-daughter will, some day, delight and inspire her own grandchild with the view of the majestic grandeur of the great Himalayas,” Prime Minister concluded his address amid sustained applause from an appreciative audience.

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