UN Chronicle | Ensuring Environmental Sustainability: 'Undoing the Damage We Have Caused'

Ensuring Environmental Sustainability
'Undoing the Damage We Have Caused'
By Horst Rutsch for the Chronicle

Article

The World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 26 August to 4 September, concluded with world leaders declaring that the "deep fault line" between rich and poor posed a major threat to global prosperity and stability. In response to these challenges, the Summit set specific global targets in poverty reduction, clean water and sanitation, and infant mortality, and also addressed related problems in agriculture, biodiversity, climate change, renewable energy and trade. The Johannesburg Summit, the biggest-ever United Nations conference, with 191 countries participating and over 21,340 accreditations, brought together 104 heads of State and Government.

Adopting the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development and reaffirming their commitment to Agenda 21, which was adopted ten years earlier in Rio de Janeiro, world leaders stated that although globalization had created new opportunities, enabling the rapid integration of markets and increasing the mobility of capital and investment flows, benefits and costs were unevenly distributed. "We risk the entrenchment of these global disparities", the Summit acknowledged, "and unless we act in a manner that fundamentally changes their lives, the poor of the world may lose confidence in their representatives and the democratic systems to which we remain committed, seeing their representatives as nothing more than sounding brass or tinkling cymbals". The Declaration noted that the global environment continued to suffer from the loss of biodiversity, depletion of fish stocks, advancing desertification, worsening climate change, more frequent and devastating natural disasters, and increasingly vulnerable developing countries.

The Summit also adopted a wide-ranging Implementation Plan, which aims to tackle many of these challenges by 2015 and calls for:

halving the proportion of the world's population who live on less than $1 a day;

halving the number of people living without safe drinking water or basic sanitation;

reducing mortality rates for infants and children under five by two thirds; and

reducing maternal mortality by three quarters.

The Implementation Plan also calls for: "with a sense of urgency" a substantial increase in the use of renewable sources of energy, although it sets no specific targets; implementation of a new global system for classification and labelling of chemicals; and restoration of depleted fish stocks. It urges States that have not yet done so to ratify "in a timely manner" the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Other provisions address a comprehensive range of environmental and development issues, such as agriculture, biodiversity, climate change, energy and trade. The Plan also supports the development of Africa and small island States.

The President of the Summit, South African President Thabo Mbeki, in his closing statement urged that in response to all the voices heard at the conference, heads of State and Government should return to the world with the conviction "to undo the damage we have caused". The Summit's Secretary-General, Nitin Desai, said he hoped that the "Johannesburg plus 15" Conference would be able to say that measures promised during the Summit had led to a new dynamic, and that countries had lived up to their goals. All of that was possible, he said, if the decisions already made were taken seriously, adding that that was why the Summit had been called the "Summit for Action".

The Summit's high-level segment, held from 2 to 4 September, heard more than 100 world leaders address a wide range of issues, among them: the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities; the need to address the inequities of globalization; combating HIV/AIDS; changing unsustainable patterns of consumption and production; the importance of regional cooperation in achieving the goals of sustainable development; and the correlation between poverty and environmental degradation. The removal of agricultural subsidies, the transfer of environmentally sound technologies and the need for open markets for developing-world products featured prominently in most statements, which emphasized that subsidies to agricultural producers in the developed countries were detrimental to many developing-country markets.

Another issue underlined by delegations was the need to set time-bound targets for the use of renewable energy. Energy had to be provided to the 2 billion people who lacked access, speakers said, without increasing pollution and changing the climate. Some suggested a global target of 15 per cent renewable energy by 2010, with industrial countries taking the lead. Sustainable development could not be achieved if sources of energy were not renewable or efficient, they stressed.

A number of speakers addressed global climate change, with representatives of small island developing States, in particular, stressing the dire impact of sea-level rise on their very survival. Small island nations, noted one speaker, should not disappear due to the "greed" of the industrialized world. For many of them, another speaker said, time—"the most precious non-renewable resource"—was running out.

The high-level segment also included four round-table events, during which heads of State and Government held discussions with heads of United Nations specialized agencies, as well as with representatives of intergovernmental agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other major groups. Canada and the Russian Federation announced their intention to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which raised the prospect that it could come into force without the participation of the United States, which has long opposed it. The Protocol would set the first binding restrictions on emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases by the industrialized nations.

In plenary sessions, government delegations, major groups, specialized agencies, United Nations funds and programmes, intergovernmental organizations, NGOs and business representatives discussed partnerships in the five priority areas outlined by Secretary-General Kofi Annan prior to the Summit: water, energy, health, agricultural productivity and biodiversity. Numerous partnerships were launched to undertake initiatives aimed at achieving various goals within the priority areas, with the clearest achievements being made in water and sanitation.

Partnerships and Commitments

The United States will invest $970 million over the next three years on water and sanitation projects. It pledged $90 million for sustainable agriculture programmes and up to $43 million in energy projects next year, and will spend $53 million on forests in 2002-2005. It further pledged to spend $2.3 billion through 2003 on health programmes, including the Global Fund against HIV/AIDS.

The European Union announced a $700-million energy initiative; and its "Water for Life" initiative seeks to engage partners to meet water and sanitation goals, primarily in Africa and Central Asia.

The Asian Development Bank announced a $5-million grant to the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UN-Habitat) and $500 million in fast-track credit for the Water for Asian Cities Programme.

The world's nine major energy companies signed a range of agreements with the United Nations to facilitate technical cooperation for sustainable energy projects in developing countries. The South African energy utility, Eskom, announced a partnership to extend modern energy services to neighbouring countries.

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