Rosmarie Bär: a sustainable committment
Rosmarie Bär, our colleague and long-time political companion, retires at the end of this year.
In 1996 Rosmarie took over our international environment and climate policy desk. For 14 years she has been our memory for the numerous international sustainable development processes triggered by the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. In official Swiss delegations, where she has vigorously represented Alliance Sud, she had increasingly become the only person in recent times able to remind the delegation about former official stances. This makes Rosmarie both a valuable and an uncomfortable presence.
From 1987 to 1995 Rosmarie Bär was a prominent Member of Parliament for the Green Party. She was part of the powerful women triumvirate or maternate that left its mark on the Green parliamentary group during that period. That she would subsequently join the Alliance Sud team, with no airs and graces, no special claims and for equal pay was not a matter of course – yet for her it was.
In recent years Rosmarie has been dealing with water shortage, the processes emanating from the Rio 92 Conference and with global warming. In the years 1999/2000 the privatization of public water supply systems reached its peak, and private water companies were hoping to gain a foothold in Switzerland as well. That was resisted by the Working Group called «Water – a public good», which she had built up for Alliance Sud. In the international arena, she joined ranks with European and North American NGOs to push the idea of a UN Water Convention, which did not materialize after all. Instead the discussions shifted towards introducing a human right to water at the United Nations. Lastly, Rosmarie followed the endeavours to conclude a climate convention to replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2012, and the ongoing revision of the CO2 law in Switzerland.
In all these fields Rosmarie witnessed the deterioration rather than improvement of key environmental indicators. Rosmarie found it hard to digest the fact that the two decades of «sustainable development» have manifestly failed to yield sustainable outcomes.
We hope that in the future Rosmarie will be able to dedicate more time to cultivating her extensive circle of friends and to continue her involvement in a fitting manner.
Peter Niggli, Director Alliance Sud
Article published in Alliance Sud News no. 33, winter 2010/11
