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India holds the key to taking the Commonwealth lead in sustainable solutions for development. We face an immense global challenge of developing sustainably. We know climate change already contributes to migration and conflict. Some Commonwealth countries are unable to generate the economic growth they badly need to become more resilient. In contrast, India has developed successfully into the world's seventh largest economy, and third largest by purchasing power parity, hence increasingly a world leader in economic growth. Yet even India suffers climate change risks through a warming climate and extreme weather events; effects on agriculture and food security; falling water tables and water stress; melting glaciers affecting rivers, also impacting hydropower and thermal power generation; sea level rise and storm surges threatening coastal cities; and always the challenge of climate driven migration as will affect so much of the world in decades to come. Hence for India, as for the rest of the world, financing sustainable development and deploying skilled resource to undertake infrastructure projects are key issues for the future. It is forecast that there will be $90 trillion of infrastructure investment worldwide over the next 15 years. This is renewing aged infrastructure in the developed world and creating new infrastructure in developing countries. A massive overall investment in land use, energy and the urban environment that needs to be on a sustainable pathway or it will lock us all into worryingly high global warming. Choices made soon will shape the future of the world's climate system, and bad outcomes will make it near certain we shall exceed the global warming level that the international community has agreed not to cross. It is wonderful the Commonwealth already enables diverse networks and collaborations across 52 countries and nearly a third of the population of our planet. It has no real equivalent and has so many advantages of common language, legal frameworks, and historic ties that truly it would be a crime not to take advantage of this remarkable global network to jointly address the major challenges of this century. We owe it to our children and all young people to try and mitigate the alarming threats to their future. Happily, sustainability is now becoming mainstream thinking for multinationals and global investors. It is the only sensible investment option for the long term. A serious gap is that small and medium sized enterprises, key to economic growth and job creation, are in general not yet adequately engaged in and benefitting from sustainable global enterprise. That needs to be addressed as widely as possible. The Commonwealth has the opportunity to capitalise on existing networks and collaborations to help all member nations jointly face the future with greater confidence and resilience for whatever may come. There is great need for exemplary, well communicated global collaboration that will put to shame the growing tendency in some countries towards narrow national self-interest. We share one planet, and everything is connected, so co-operation must be the way forward for any hope of resolving the threats to humanity that are for some countries increasingly close or already manifest. Commonwealth nations, and not just governments but also businesses and civil society, can with strong leadership cooperate on action plans to build collaborative working models and practical systems to take forward objectives such as:
