Conscious Choice: A Tale of Two (Disappointing) Summits

November 2002 | News of the Earth

A Tale of Two (Disappointing) Summits

by Dave Aftandilian

In terms of concrete progress the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was pretty much a flop, largely thanks to the United States. The National Environmental Trust said environmentalists were "extremely disappointed" with the Johannesburg summit held from August 26th to September 4th of this year. Mark Malloch Brown, administrator for the U.N. Development Program, admitted that, "If you judge this summit for its new architecture for the world’s environment and development, then yes, it certainly failed to provide that." Even normally upbeat U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan lamented that Johannesburg was "obviously not Rio" referring to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro back in 1992, which resulted in new international treaties on global warming and biodiversity.

Forty-thousand participants from more than 100 nations met in Johannesburg, South Africa at the WSSD. The WSSD followed in the footsteps of Rio which, in turn, had itself been preceded by an international conference in Stockholm in 1972 that jump-started cleanup of polluted air and water in the industrialized nations.

In advance of the WSSD, the United Nations prepared a report on the current state of the environment and development that placed the summit’s work in context. According to this report, world population passed 6 billion in 2000, is expected to grow to 8 billion in 2025, 9.3 billion in 2050, and finally stabilize sometime after that between 10.5 and 11 billion people. "This increased population," the report stated, "combined with higher standards of living, particularly in the developing countries, will pose enormous strains on land, water, energy, and other natural resources."

For instance, the increasing demand for food and the loss of arable land due to over-cultivation poses the greatest global threat to forests, wetlands, mountains, and biodiversity, and this threat will only grow more severe as we need to feed more and more people. By 2025, about half of the world’s population will live in areas facing severe water shortages, again in large part due to expansion of agriculture. Meanwhile, consumption of all types of energy is rising everywhere in the world, as are the emissions of carbon dioxide, a leading cause of global warming.

You would think those disturbing facts and figures would have inspired the delegates to the WSSD to really knuckle down and find ways to take concrete actions to help development proceed in a manner that does not destroy either the natural or human resources that make it possible. You would think the delegates would have built on the broad consensus reached at Rio, setting clear targets and establishing strict timetables to meet them. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong.

Let’s start with the good news. "The Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development," the official manifesto of the WSSD, included language that recognized the mutual interdependence of economic development, social development, and environmental protection, from local to global levels. As Nathan Wyeth, who represented the Sierra Student Coalition at the WSSD, put it, "Without a doubt, we have decisively won the battle over values on the environment and equity." Even multinational corporations feel compelled at least to mouth platitudes about sustainable development and attempt to greenwash over the worst of their exploitive activities.

But even though WSSD delegates shared a sense of the problems the world faces in the quest for sustainable development, they could not reach agreement on how to solve them. The official "Plan of Implementation" from the summit is completely voluntary and nonbinding, with no mechanisms to enforce even the very few provisions that have specific timetables for completion.

According to many who attended the summit, the U.S. bears much of the blame for this failure. President Bush’s decision to spend the summit at his ranch in Texas instead of in Johannesburg didn’t help. Even more crippling, though, was the U.S. delegation’s stubborn resistance to setting new targets for progress and timetables for their implementation. The U.S. (along with a shifting coalition of other bad guys) torpedoed many provisions, such as guarantees of human, environmental, and freedom of information rights and targets for increasing the percentage of world energy produced from clean, renewable sources.

Not All Was Lost

To be fair, the WSSD implementation plan did set a handful of worthy, specific targets. For instance, it aims to halve by 2015 the number of people without access to safe drinking water or adequate sanitation, to "maintain or restore depleted fish stocks," and to "achieve by 2010 a significant reduction in the current rate of loss of biological diversity." But without any specific mechanisms to achieve these goals or to track progress, it seems very unlikely that any of them will be attained.

Instead, according to assistant secretary of state John F. Turner of the U.S. delegation to the WSSD, "public-private partnerships are where the action is" in terms of supporting sustainable development. The idea is that partnerships between Western corporations and governments of developing nations will help those governments deliver social services more cheaply and efficiently than targets or timetables would. Before the WSSD, over 220 such partnerships, leveraging $235 million, had been identified, and 60 more were announced during the summit. The U.S., for instance, promised $970 million in investments over the next three years on water and sanitation projects, and $90 million for sustainable agriculture programs.

What the U.S. delegation refused to say, however, is whether these programs represented new money or just a repackaging of funds already previously earmarked for these projects. And as with the rest of the summit, with no concrete targets or timetables, partnerships are likely to be ineffective at best, and to provide opportunities for multinational corporations to continue business as usual, newly wrapped in the mantle of U.N.-conferred respectability, at worst.

Earth Charter Chicago Summit

The failure of the WSSD has led many to question the whole idea of large-scale environmental summits. If they accomplish nothing but P.R. for governments and corporations, what good are they? To try to answer that question for myself, I attended a different kind of environmental summit this past September — the Earth Charter Chicago Summit.

The Earth Charter is a visionary document drafted by thousands of people in 78 countries. This international grassroots effort provides a framework for a new global ethics that recognizes the interdependence of all life on earth and sets out 16 principles of respect and care. More than 8,000 organizations around the world, representing more than 100 million people, have endorsed the Earth Charter since it was officially released in 2000. It has become especially popular in Latin America — so much so that 10,000 schoolchildren gathered in Acre, Brazil recently to celebrate Earth Charter Day. Yet the charter remains virtually unknown here in the U.S.

To help educate and excite people about the document, Earth Charter Summits were held simultaneously in 12 U.S. cities last September. This year, summits were held in 20 cities. Chicago hosted a summit both years, most recently at DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus. Speeches, panel discussions, and other activities were meant to help people move the principles of the Earth Charter from the printed page into their lives and the work of their organizations.

Measured against that criterion, I’d have to say this year’s Earth Charter Chicago summit didn’t enjoy much more success than the WSSD, at least from where I sat in the audience. Even at the panel discussion entitled "Applying the Earth Charter in Chicago," only one of the three panelists even mentioned the Earth Charter in his presentation, let alone discussed how to actually put its very fine ideas into practice.

But I still feel the Earth Charter Chicago Summit was valuable — probably more so than the WSSD — because of what I saw happening during the question and answer sessions. Inspired by what they had heard from the speakers, audience members began to ask probing questions, identifying some of the big challenges we need to resolve to protect the environment while also safeguarding human welfare. For instance, the need for a new model of how corporations ought to operate — one whose terms are set by people rather than mythical "free markets" — came through very strongly, as did the need to incorporate environmental education into curricula at all levels, from kindergarten to college and beyond.

Obviously these aren’t new problems, but what was exciting was to see people raising them in a group setting at the summit, and then working together to brainstorm solutions, pooling their knowledge and ideas in a way that made the thoughts of any one person go much farther than they would in an empty room. Connecting, networking, sharing fellowship — goals such as these can only be achieved in the larger setting of a conference or summit. Yet many nongovernmental organizations — now known in official U.N.-speak as "civil society" — felt they had been frozen out of the WSSD, that they were not able to exchange ideas with the governmental representatives.

This makes me think we need a new model for environmental summits. Perhaps instead of putting all our eggs in the once-a-decade baskets of the U.N. Earth Summits, we should focus on more frequent local, national, and regional gatherings. Participants could then get together to share the results of their work at international meetings, or through international umbrella organizations. It would be ideal if this process could exist outside of governmental or corporate sponsorship, so that ideas could flow more freely.

The biggest lesson I took away from the Earth Charter Chicago Summit was this: if our elected leaders will not exercise responsible, forward-thinking leadership from above, then we must do so from below. How exactly to do this I’m not sure, but if we ever want things to change in Washington and Johannesburg and everywhere else, this is the only way to go. Gathering like-minded people around the banner of the Earth Charter seems a fine way to start. If you agree, you can get in touch with fellow Chicagoans interested in the Earth Charter through the Earth Charter Summit’s Web page listed below.

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Earth Charter Summits

World Summit on Sustainable Development

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