In 1992, with a tremendous sense of optimism, world leaders gathered at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit and for the first time cobbled together agreements to begin jointly attacking emerging global environmental problems: overfishing, loss of biodiversity, global warming, forest destruction.
Nations agreed to hold fossil fuel emissions at 1990 levels to slow global warming and to set limits on catches of threatened fish. They promised to stem the loss of forests, promote sustainable energy use and protect vanishing species. Just as important, they agreed that cutting poverty and promoting sustainable development around the world were critical to protecting the Earth’s environment.
As leaders meet again this week at the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, fossil fuel emissions have grown about 10 percent worldwide and a whopping 18 percent in the United States. Three-quarters of the world’s fisheries are overfished, forests have shrunk by an area the size of Texas and Louisiana combined, extreme weather is increasingly blamed on global warming, and rare habitats are disappearing so quickly some scientists believe the planet is entering it first major extinction since the dinosaur age.
Just as troubling, the poverty rate has barely budged and a third of the world’s 6 billion people still live on less than $1 a day.
“In the last 10 years, reality has hit. The political will to turn agreements into mechanisms to address these problems hasn’t been there,” said Jonathan Lash, head of the Washington-based World Resources Institute. “In a sense, this summit is the one where the hopes of 1992 meet the realities of the 21st Century.”
The 10-day Johannesburg congress, expected to attract more than 40,000 world leaders, activists, businesspeople and international officials, gets under way Monday with remarkably low expectations for a meeting of its size and stature.
In large part that is because President Bush has chosen not to attend, and the U.S. delegation, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, has made clear in presummit meetings that it will not sign any new agreements, and in fact would prefer to overturn many of those reached at Rio.
Bush withdraws
Under the Bush administration, the United States has developed an increasing distrust of world bodies and agreements that might restrict the country in ways that the president believes are not in the nation’s interest. Since coming to office, Bush has pulled the United States out of the Kyoto convention on global warming and withdrawn from a key missile defense pact with Russia. Foreign policy aides have expressed growing concerns that the United Nations approach of consensus decision-making is at odds with U.S. economic and security aims.
“This summit is taking place in the shadow of U.S. unilateralism,” Lash said. “In an era of global problems that require global collaboration, the U.S. appears to have declared it won’t collaborate. It has made clear it will commit no new resources, enter into no new agreements and provide no leadership.”
In practical terms, that means new international targets or deadlines are unlikely to be set in Johannesburg, and any that are passed are unlikely to be met.
Delegates are expected to agree to work toward slashing the number of people living on $1 a day or less by half by 2015.
But “the kinds of targets and agreements being negotiated are being undercut and made meaningless by the U.S. refusal to participate,” said Philip Clapp, president of the Washington-based National Environmental Trust.
Despite the U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, the global warming pact limiting greenhouse gas emissions is expected to come into effect this year with the backing of Japan and Europe, the world’s other large industrialized fossil fuel users.
But the problem of climate change “cannot be solved with the complete non-participation of the U.S.,” Clapp warned. “The world can make significant progress without the United States, but the U.S. still produces a quarter of the world’s emissions.”
Just how bad things look for the world if the summit fails to make progress in addressing global environmental ills depends on whom is being asked.
Some environmentalists say the window of opportunity for solving global problems such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity, forests and fisheries is fast closing, and that if ways are not found to reverse the current trends, the next generation may inherit a significantly degraded world.
UN Undersecretary General Nitin Desai, who will lead the summit, recently told reporters that the meeting takes place amid a “real sense of urgency” and warned that if the summit is a failure, “we will not have another chance.”
Other analysts say that despite increased droughts and flooding around the world, global environmental problems remain too intangible to induce in most people the kind of panic needed to inspire real change.
“Humanity does the right thing when it gets right to the edge and has no other choice,” said John Stremlau, the U.S.-born head of international relations at Johannesburg’s Witwatersrand University. “We’re not there yet.”
The current U.S. pullback from international deals and bodies comes as an increasing number of underdeveloped countries are showing signs of adopting U.S.-style values. War-torn and perpetually blighted Africa is finally making progress on peace from Sudan to Angola, and good governance is now a key theme not only at this week’s summit but in meetings of new international bodies such as the African Union.
“People are realizing you’ve got to have good governance and democracy, that it’s part of sustainable development. That’s a big difference from the past,” Stremlau said. “Winds of change are blowing in the direction of American principles and values, but we’re hung up on not trusting those foreigners.”
Modest goals
With the environmental aims of Rio largely sidetracked, the Johannesburg summit will put greater emphasis on sustainable development, a key environmental issue in its own right. Improving education and health care and pulling people out of poverty have long been shown to cut population growth, analysts say. The whole world has a stake as China takes to the roads–a prime indicator of growing wealth and development–in efficient cars rather than carbon dioxide-belching sport-utility vehicles, analysts say.
While the formal UN meetings this week may not produce much in the way of enforceable agreements, a variety of innovative deals on everything from increasing government accountability to improving access to drinking water are expected to emerge from behind-the-scenes meetings between non-profit groups, individual governments and the private sector, participants predicted.
“There’s considerable consensus among most of the nations attending about the connection between human well-being and large-scale environmental problems,” Lash said.
Even those who don’t predict much real progress at Johannesburg say such international meetings–criticized by some environmentalists as a colossal waste of jet fuel and paper–are worth having, if only to spread new ideas and help them take firmer root.
“Will there be significant movement at the summit? Absolutely not,” said Steven Friedman, director of the Center for Policy Studies in Washington. “What one looks for at summits like these is whether there’s any shift in the climate of opinion that might herald things down the line.
“There’s a time when debt relief for Third World countries was a pie-in-the-sky idea. Now it’s on the agenda and happening,” he said. “If events like the summit have value it’s in shifting the way people in power think about these issues, even if it’s very slowly.”
