FEATURE-At the heart of ESG and the UN SDGs

By Dr. F. E. Dias

The ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) principles and metrics are aligned with and derived from the UN Sustainable Development Goals.  The UN SDGs appear superficially benevolent but “sustainable development” does not mean at the UN what the uninitiated and gullible imagine it to be.  Sustainable development at the UN and among its friends and benefactors is associated with population, and a prospering population has been declared as the obstacle to sustainability.

From Agenda 21 to the SDGs

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), also known as Rio+10 in Johannesburg in 2002 lamented that the poorest countries tend to have the highest population growth rates, and that this undermines efforts to invest in human development, reduce poverty and promote sustainable development.  That is, to rid the world of poverty, we need to rid the world of the poor.  Among legion regional and international conferences and meetings throughout the years, was Rio+20 in 2012 with its display of a poster showing an ailing and miserable earth personified and diagnosed as being stricken by an infection of humans.  The UN Sustainable Development Summit in 2015 was convened to adopt the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which contains the SGDs and its 169 targets.

Although Thomas Robert Malthus refrained from advocating centralised enforcement of population control, Gro Brundtland, glorified by some as the godmother of sustainable development, sustained her radical feminist efforts.  She was a fervent advocate for abortion during the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), 2012, where she called on all countries to decriminalise abortion - as a “minimum” measure, declared that access to abortifacient birth control drugs and devices constituted a human right, and dissimulated on the expression “reproductive health care” denying that it is understood to include abortion.  She also refuted the inclusion of parental consent in the drive to provide “reproductive health care” to adolescents. 

Nevertheless, Dr. Brundtland was a mere pawn in anti-man anti-family anti-marriage battle, that continues to gather steam today with social justice concepts at the fore, with the social justice warriors, feminists, humanists, hedonists, and LGBT activists strung and swung along to the tune of their puppet masters, with the climate, food, pandemic and energy scares thrown in to make the masses malleable, vulnerable, docile and even convinced - as if supplementation of panem et circenses was necessary to call down the new world order with its one government and post-national states - and their citizens stripped of all pretense of sovereignty. 

Roots

The objective at this juncture is not to propose that nature exists for man - and that man is not the problematique, the cancer or the pollutant upon the Earth, but rather a problem solver, that man’s ingenuity is a resource, that human creativity is the world’s source of wealth.  The Club of Rome is renowned for its 1972 report I limiti dello sviluppo that identified the dangers to humanity of the population explosion, scarcity of food and resources, and an energy crisis.  They responded to the Brundtland report in 1987 by drafting the Earth Charter, Mikhail Gorbachev being a protagonist who failed to learn a lesson from the recent history of his own country.  Their second report in 1974 is famed for referring to humanity as a cancer upon the earth: “The World Has Cancer and The Cancer Is Man”.  In 1991 it concluded that the enemy of humanity is humanity itself. 

Although environmental stewardship is important, debunking lifeboat economics to discover that the earth is not a spaceship, and demonstrating that demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development, may not be required considering that humanity prospered at unprecedented pace in the 20^th century as compared to the ages that preceded it all, while population and consumption was rapidly growing – as did the availability and accessibility of natural resources.  The present demographic crisis is in fact an ageing population and a dearth of children, with the birth control and abortion culture, destruction of family values and the reconceptualisation of woman leading not only to spiritual disaster but also to depopulation with Europe already in decline, and over 13% of homes in Japan now empty.

The history of racist eugenics and utilitarian population control prior to the secular ecologists and Social Darwinists is not treated herein.  However the heritage of inter alia Herbert Spenser, William Sumner, Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger is enjoyed by the drivers of sustainable development today.  Notably the first World Population Conference of the UN’s predecessor the League of Nations in Geneva 1927, was Sanger’s initiative.  She founded Planned Parenthood which is the largest abortion business in the USA, having tentacles all over the developing world via the IPPF.  It is closely associated with the UNFPA - the UN’s Population Fund, and also with the foetal body parts industry.  Planned Parenthood is the parent organisation of the Sri Lanka Family Planning Association.  

Conclusion

The objective herein has been to substantiate the nature of “sustainable development” as it is contained in the UN SDGs which cohabit with ESGs, and to preface the complex motivations that impel it, so that we may better understand the ESG surge, and explore its current and potential impact on institutions and individuals.  Fundamental to the idea of sustainable development as promoted by the organs of the United Nations, and associated bodies such as the World Economic Forum, the European Union, the Club of Rome, funded by governments, corporations, international banks and reputed family Foundations, and as manifested in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which are embedded in the UN Global Compact, sustainability reporting frameworks such as the GRI, and ultimately the ESGs – is a misanthropic view of man.   

Grave concern then is ipso facto due, as to already manifesting corollaries and further implications on companies, countries, society at large and eventually individuals, as ESG proceeds from talk to policy, from annual reports and competitions to audited full disclosures, from voluntary selective scoring to standardised mandated performance metrics.  The question is arisen as to whether ruin impends consequent to compliance - as well as to non-compliance, and the creed and the deities of ESG are due our studied attention prior to submission of homage.

(Dr. F.E. Dias is a Board Leadership qualified Chartered Scientist and Chartered Engineer, who received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge.  His experience in business spans inter alia the food, chemicals and cosmetics industries and agriculture).