No one happy at biggest int’l meet
RIO DE JANEIRO—It was hard to find a happy soul at the end of the Rio+20 environmental summit.
Not within the legion of blearyeyed government negotiators from 188 nations who met in a failed attempt to find a breakthrough at the United Nations conference on sustainable development.
Not among the thousands of activists who decried the threeday summit that ended late Friday as dead on arrival. Not even in the top UN official who organized the international organization’s largest-ever event.
“This is an outcome that makes nobody happy. My job was to make everyone equally unhappy,” Sha Zukang, secretary general of the conference said, nicely summing up the mood.
The antipoverty organization CARE called the meeting “nothing more than a political charade,” while Greenpeace said the gathering was “a failure of epic proportions.”
The Pew Environment Group was slightly more charitable. “It would be a mistake to call Rio a failure,” the group said. “But for a once-in-a-decade meeting with so much at stake, it was a far cry from a success.”
While the summit meeting’s 283-paragraph agreement, called “The Future We Want,” lacks enforceable commitments on climate change and other global challenges, the outcome reflects big power shifts around the world.
These include a new assertiveness by developing nations in international forums and the growing capacity of grassroots organizations and corporations to mold effective environmental action without the blessing of governments.
The Obama administration offered no grand public gestures, opting to focus on smaller-scale development projects, like clean cook stoves and local energy projects.
Failure avoided
Europe, traditionally the driving force behind environmental action yet distracted now by efforts to contain a financial crisis, was considerably more active than the United States, taking part in nearly every corner of the sprawling conference, called Rio+20 to commemorate the anniversary of the first Earth Summit held here in 1992.
In the end, this conference was a conference that decided to have more conferences.
That result was hailed as a success by the 100 heads of state who attended.
Given how environmental summits have failed in recent years as global economic turmoil squashes political will to take on climate and conservation issues, the mere fact of agreeing to talk again in the future constitutes victory.
Faced with the real prospect of complete failure, negotiators who struggled for months to hammer out a more ambitious final document ended up opting for the lowest common denominator.
Just hours before the meeting opened, they agreed on a proposal that makes virtually no progress beyond what was signed at the 1992 summit, removing contentious proposals that activists contend are required to avoid an environmental meltdown.
700 promises
“We’ve sunk so low in our expectations that reaffirming what we did 20 years ago is now considered a success,” said Martin Khor, executive director of the Geneva-based South Centre.
Indeed, the word “reaffirm” is used 59 times in the 49-page agreement.
They reaffirm the need to achieve sustainable development (but not mandating how); reaffirm commitment to strengthening international cooperation (just not right now); and reaffirm the need to achieve economic stability (with no new funding for the poorest nations).
Some of the biggest issues that activists wanted to see in the document that didn’t make it in included a call to end subsidies for fossil fuels, language underscoring the reproductive rights of women, and some words on how nations might mutually agree to protect the high seas, areas that fall outside any national jurisdictions.
“We saw anything of value in the early text getting removed one by one. What is left is the clear sense that the future we want is not one our leaders can actually deliver,” said Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace.
On the “glass half full” side of things, while the effort to make progress on multilateral talks among the collective UN body were a disappointment, the gathering produced nearly 700 promises and advances made by individual countries, companies and other organizations, in total worth about $500 billion if actually followed through
Old arguments
For instance, the United States agreed to partner with more than 400 companies, including WalMart, Coca-Cola and Unilever, to support their efforts to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains by 2020.
Andrew Deutz, the director of international government relations at the Nature Conservancy, pointed out that Indonesia, Australia and Colombia all made strong commitments to protecting oceans in their national waters, in part to ensure future food security.
Despite the shifting global economic order, critics noted that negotiators still argued along the lines of old “north-south” arguments that pit richer developed nations against developing nations.
The Group of 77 nations that represents the poorest on the globe maintained their demand that richer nations in Europe and the United States recognize their “historic debt” eating up a much greater amount of the globe’s resources since the industrial revolution began 250 years ago.
They say rich nations should finance environmental improvements in the poorer nations, and also freely transfer technology that would help the developing nations use more renewable energy and build cleaner industrial sectors.
“Everything has been kicked down the lane a few years, we’ll have to wait to formalize sustainable development goals and make the transition to a green economy,” said Muhammed Chowdhury, a lead negotiator of Group of 77.
“It’s not a good scenario,” he added.
‘Unsustainable Nonsense’
The sheer size of the gathering—nearly 50,000 participants—may have raised expectations in spite of the mixed record of previous such gatherings.
Yet despite this record, the activity outside the main negotiating sessions produced hundreds of side agreements that did not require ratification or direct financing by governments and that offered the promise of incremental but real progress.
For instance, Microsoft said it would roll out an internal carbon fee on its operations in more than 100 countries, part of a plan to go carbon-neutral by 2030.
A group of development banks announced a $175-billion initiative to promote public transportation and bicycle lanes over road and highway construction in the world’s largest cities.
But the ubiquity of corporate and financial sponsorship made some uneasy.
“If George Orwell were alive today, he would be irritated, and then shocked, by the cynical way in which every lobby with an ax to grind and money to burn has hitched its wagon to the alluring phrase ‘sustainable development,’” Jagdish N. Bhagwati, an economics professor, said in an essay called “Rio’s Unsustainable Nonsense.”