DRAFT 1
Earth Summit 2012 -
Reviving the Spirit of Rio
By Maurice Strong and Felix Dodds
While the media was focussing almost all its attention on the Copenhagen Climate Change conference at the end of last year, it missed a rather significant development in international environmental policy. On 24th in December, the United Nations General Assembly agreed to hold an ‘Earth Summit’ in 2012’, again in Rio de Janeiro, twenty years after landmark Conference on Environment and Development in 1992.
An Earth Summit in 2012 was first proposed in 2007 when the Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva proposed the Summit at the speaking at the U.N. General Assembly, stating:. Proposing the Summit he said:
“If we want to salvage our common heritage, a new and more balanced distribution of wealth is needed, both internationally and within each country. Social equity is our best weapon against the planet’s degradation,”
It was clear to President Lula and to many others that the world has changed enormously since 1992, when the world agreed to Agenda 21 (LINK TO AGENDA 21) – the outcome document from the Rio Earth Summit and the blueprint for creating a sustainable planet in the 21st century.
Many of the problems we are now facing result from the 1992 agreements not having been implemented by governments. Though the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johanesburg in 2002 sought to address some of the problems in the implementation of Agenda 21, many felt that the outcome of that Summit lacked the necessary commitment and conviction to drive progress forward. In addressing the UN General Assembly four years later, the South African President expressed the anger of most developing countries about the continued broken promises by developed countries when he said:
“We have not implemented the Monterrey Consensus on Financing for Development, thus making it difficult for the majority of the developing countries, especially those in Africa, to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, and have reduced the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation to an insignificant and perhaps forgotten piece of paper.”
As a result, we now face challenges on a number of fronts
· We are living beyond the carrying capacity of the planet.
· The still prevailing consumer- based economic model is not only failing to deliver progress to enormous numbers of the world’s population, but is seriously compromising the possibility for us all to live on this planet equitably.
· Because of the lack of implementation of previous sustainable development agreements there is now an increasing link between environment and security.
· Climate change has emerged as a driver of the problems we are facing.
· The emergence of the G20 and in particular Brazil, South Africa India and China (the BASIC group) is rebalancing the debate.
· The UN hasn’t the mandate, the tools nor or the institutions needed to address the present and future challenges.
What issues should be addressed by an Earth Summit in 2012?
A range of governmental and non-governmental actors have contributed to thinking about the kinds of issues that an Earth Summit should address and have come forward with a very ambitious agenda. The GA resolution last year identifies four areas of focus for the Summit.
1. The green economy and poverty alleviation
The present economic model is fuelling our dash to disaster as it is built on the assumption of an infinite availability of natural resources. . The principal goal of our economy should be to improve the lives of people and to free them from want and ignorance – responsible capitalism can produce enough wealth to meet society’s needs equitably, without compromising the planet. Yet the past thirty years have been characterised by irresponsible capitalism, pursuing limitless economic growth at the expense of both society and environment, channelling more and more money into fewer hands, with little or no regard for the natural resource base upon which such wealth is built.
Almost 20 years after the Earth Summit we are still faced with the same challenge that the Club of Rome posed in its Limits to Growth report (1972). How can we continue to advance human prosperity in a world with finite resources?
Earth Summit 2012: must give us a new green growth path while recognising that any new form of development must be both sustainable and accessible to all.
2. Emerging Issues
A host of emerging issues since the Johannesburg Summit in 2002 have been filling our newspapers. Environment and security issues are becoming increasingly intertwined – the so-called ‘environment- security nexus’ covers the overlapping issues such as climate security, energy security, food security, water security, health security and environmental refugees. The clear relationship between environmental degradation and human security was made even more apparent by the recent earthquake in Haiti, the impacts of which were significantly worsened in one part of the island due to deforestation. .
At the Copenhagen Climate meeting, the Bangladesh Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith said he expected 20 million environmental refugees to be fleeing his country by 2050, and warned that developed countries should have be prepared to accommodate many of them.
Earth Summit 2012: needs to develop a new blueprint to address the environmental and security (nexus?) challenges and find a positive and encouraging way by which people can work together in addressing them.
3. Sustainable Development Governance
The present global institutions that exist are inadequate to deal with the challenges ahead. This is not only in the area of environment with UNEP but also in the area of sustainable development with the UN Commission on Sustainable Development.
Earth Summit 2012: will consider the need to upgrade UNEP into a UN entity that can play a role in clustering the vast array of multilateral environmental agreements. UNEP’s role should be strengthened in building a strong integrated science base for policy makers.
The Trusteeship Council, could be reformed, as was discussed at Rio in 1992, to become a Sustainable Development Council, putting sustainable development at its rightful place at the top of the UN system.
4. Review of previous commitments
The clear lack of implementation of the Rio and Johannesburg agreements needs to be understood and addressed if any future agreement will stand any better chance of implementation.
Earths Summit 2012: could be informed by an independent assessment by a high level panel on the reasons behind the lack of implementation.
Climate Change Too
Climate Change is compounding a whole host of environmental problems. The international community must redouble its efforts to address these problems and strive for a meaningful agreement in COP16 in Mexico. It is not acceptable for countries who have had this so long to address the issues to continue to pass on the problems on to their successors. If we are to keep to within a 1.5 degree temperature rise then the current offers on the table are not good enough.
Earth Summit 2012 will be the next time when Heads of State come together to develop a vision for achieving sustainable development in the 21st century. iIt will also be twenty years from when their predecessors signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change. In 2012 governments need to sign up to a 40% cut in CO2 by 2020 – this will require leadership not only from the US, Europe and Russia, but also from China and other members of the BASIC group of countries.
The Rio Spirit
Agenda 21 unleashed a global movement of stakeholders who have engaged in dialogue and action on how we could all live together more cooperatively, and share the world’s resources more equitably and sustainably. These stakeholders brought with them a whole range of policy recommendations over the last twenty years and many great ideas.
Earth Summit 2012: should also be about stakeholders translating their ideas, experience and energy into concrete commitments to tackle the challenges that face us. The involvement at all levels enriches our democracies as we move towards a more participatory democratic model. The strengthening of governance at all levels must be part of the legacy of the Earth Summit in 2012.
Developed nations have had over twenty years to promote and invest in sustainable development both domestically and through Overseas Development Assistance. Despite an awareness of the increasing threat posed to our environmental support systems by the current development paradigm, little has been achieved, and the lack of both remedial and preventative action at an earlier stage has only increased the scale and cost of the required actions today.
Earth Summit 2012 must be about a ‘new deal’ between north and south, between young and old, between rich and poor and between this and future generations. A new deal which this time must be delivered.