World Summit on Sustainable Development Department of Public Information - News and Media Services Division - New York
	Johannesburg, South Africa 26 August-4 September 2002	30 August 2002

PRESS CONFERENCE ON SUMMIT'S ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT   At a Summit press conference this afternoon, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and South African Government representatives described the preliminary results of a project to monitor and reduce the environmental impact of the Sustainable Development Summit -- with the hope of applying the results to future major conferences. Alvaro Umana of UNDP told correspondents that each time one person attended a conference and crossed the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, the emissions generated in the round trip were about 100 tons. Thus, a measurement and mechanism must be created to offset that in a cohesive and calculated way, and this Summit was the first time attempts were being made to do so. Joining him were others partners in the initiative, Mary Metcalf, Provincial Minister for Agriculture, Conservation, Environment and Land, Gauteng Province of South Africa, and Nikhil Sekhram, UNDP-Global Environment Fund. Ms. Metcalf said during the past year the partners in the project had sought to insert inputs on sustainable practices into the Summit's logistical preparations. They had posed questions about the responsible use of resources, responsible waste management, and whether companies had considered the environmental implications of their work. On waste management, for example, efforts had been made to minimize its production, and reductions had been made at the point of purchase, in terms of unnecessary packaging. Multi-media litterbins had been placed in all of the conference venues, which was a first for South Africa, where recycling and care about using resources was only beginning to capture the imagination. There had also been enormous challenges to "green" the Summit by reducing energy consumption, she said. Two Summit venues were powered by alternative or renewable "green" energy. That legacy would live on in several ways: a lessons learned document would be presented to the United Nations to enable it to keep the initiative alive and to continue to improve the policy of greening future summits. Also, new understandings, changed attitudes and alternative behaviours were emerging, not only among delegates, but also among the citizens of South Africa. Adding to the discussion of challenges, Mr. Umana said that there were 700 million tourist arrivals each year, and that was expected to triple by 2020 to more than 2.1 billion arrivals in a single year. Calculating the emissions of all those people suggested a tremendous incentive for creating carbon markets and promoting the absorption of all those emissions. Carbon was just one example behind the initiative. Mr. Sekhran said monitoring of the Summit itself had been going on for about 11 days and, while it was premature to draw conclusions, there had been some interesting findings. Among them, about 16 tons of waste was being generated per day and, of that amount, 3.4 tons was being recycled. On water consumption, there was a daily average of 563 kilolitres at the conference sites being measured. Electricity use averaged 118.5 megawatt hours per day. Responding to a question about what had happened to the promise of "zero waste" during the Summit, she said that the slogan that had been adopted was "no more waste". She never had any illusions that it would be a green Summit. Rather, she and her partners had sought to achieve the highest levels of best practices and put those on the table to engage delegates. What was important was that more waste was being recycled and delegates were being given the choice to leave a lasting impact. To a question about whether the participants were disappointed that only seven countries had signed up for offsetting carbon emissions and the initiative had raised only $300,000 out of expected total of $5 million, Ms. Metcalf said she would love to see more participation of individuals, countries and companies in recognition of the need to offset the personal and collective responsibility, but there had been some benefit and some offset, she said. Press Conferences Summit News