Can a World Parliament Save the Environment?

Finally, the UN headquarters in New York, after the renovation works that lasted for a decade, are reopened for the inaugural session of the World Parliamentary Assembly (WPA). After the natural disasters that have occurred in the last twenty months, there is a great hope that the fresh institution will be able to act where the previous intergovernmental summits could only quarrel. The substantial increase of pollution-related deaths, the growth of contamination-related diseases, the increasing recurrence of hurricanes, floods, and droughts have generated the awareness that new institutions and new institutional arrangements are needed to address the environmental emergency. The environmentally related riots that have occurred in the last months in London and Mumbai, Berlin and Moscow, Mexico City and Chicago are just the tip of the iceberg of the fact that, until realistic radical reforms are enacted, civil coexistence will be jeopardized.