Travel 2025

While I am trying to slow down a little and to keep my carbon footprint reasonable, there are requests and opportunities that I cannot easily refuse. They are described below.

Thonon-les-Bains

On 19 January I took part in an interfaith panel for World Religion Day with representatives of a number of faith groups, held in a theatre in downtown Thonon-les-Bains in France around the lake from Geneva. The topic was "Unity in Diversity" and there was a good audience and an interesting discussion. I have spoken previously several years ago at events for this day organised by the Bahá'ís.

Hamburg, Germany

The next trip was to Hamburg, Germany, on 2-8 February at The New Institute, where my friend Maja Groff is based for a year with the Planetary Governance Program, and organised with the Climate Governance Commission (CGC) an Expert Meeting on Proposals to Enhance Global Environmental Governance. The meeting reviewed Earth System governance, my presentation on the history of environmental governance, the design of UNEP, principle-based decision-making, the Global Commons Alliance and the Earth Commission, institutional upgrades to adopt binding global legislation, a Global Resilience Council, Earth System management as a fourth pillar of the UN, necessary governance functions, a Planetary Emergency Declaration and platform, governance gaps, and adaptive governance. It also explored proposals for an International Court for the Environment. With many additional expert contributions online, we were able to go deeply into these critical issues, building on the paper Sylvia Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen (also there) and I prepared for the CGC a few years ago.

The main activity this month was my visit to the Netherlands from 11-21 April. I stayed with my dear friends the Vinkhuyzens, and at the airport on arrival I had dinner with their son Erasmus, with whom I have had Bahá'í classes for years, before he left for the Scandinavian Youth Conference in Norway. They organised a deepening one evening, a class on the Earth System for the junior youth, a fireside on transformative change, a dinner with researchers from Wageningen University, and a deepening on growing spiritually. The last weekend 18-21 April was the Justice Conference at de Poort, where I gave a keynote and held two workshops on "Building Community Resilience Against Complex Risks". The paper can be read here.

In May, my only travel was to Istanbul on 8-11 May for the ebbf-Ethical Business Building the Future annual conference on the theme "Leading with Purpose: Building Capacity for Progress at the Crossroads".