Washington — Ten years after the Earth Summit in Rio, the United Nations is hosting another global meeting to discuss strategies for development that are environmentally, socially and economically sustainable. Some 60,000 people, including more than 100 heads of state, are gathering in Johannesburg, South Africa from August 26 to September 4 for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), also know as "Rio+10."
But expectations for results from this world meeting are mixed. The 1992 Earth Summit was the largest international gathering ever held on that subject and included 108 heads of state and government. The United Nations insists that the conference was a major success because it raised public awareness of the need to fully integrate environmental and social considerations into discussions of economic development policy. Yet most analysts agree, and the United Nations concurs, that Agenda 21, the call for action following the Rio meeting, has not been implemented.
Since the Earth Summit, according to a summary prepared by the Worldwatch institute, carbon emissions globally have increased by 9 percent. In some developed countries - the major polluters - they increased by as much as 18 percent. And forested area has declined by more than 2 percent. Goals set by the Earth Summit and subsequent conferences for increases in access to safe drinking water and sanitation, increases in education, and a decline in world hunger have similarly not been met.
Nonetheless, insists Nitin Desai, the Secretary General of the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development, these large global meetings are useful because they help to focus attention on important issues and establish priorities. Desai, who is also the United Nations Undersecretary General for Economic and Social Affairs, argues that the Rio summit helped map out the general problems the world faces in these areas, and the Johannesburg summit will help define the particular route to address them.
"I hope the focus will be very clearly on concrete programs, on clear goals, on partnerships, and accountability and responsibility for results," Desai says. "Accountability and responsibility for results. It is not a slogan like sustainable development; it is more results oriented." In an interview with Jim Cason for allAfrica.com, Desai also warned that unless there are concrete results the entire world summit process could be discredited.
Below is part one of the two-part interview with Desai.
The agenda for the World Summit on Sustainable Develoment (WSSD) is pretty broad. It seems to include almost every major issue on the global stage. How are you going to focus the summit agenda?
I'd say this is a summit about making it happen. What we want out of this is not just declarations. What we want out of this is commitments at a programmatic level for action. We have identified five areas - not to the exclusion of others - but five as being critical to solve these underlying problems.
First, water and sanitation. We have more than a billion people without access to safe water and more than twice that without access to safe sanitation. Unless we resolve that there is no way we are going to resolve either the short term problems of the sort we are now facing in southern Africa or longer term issues of health, poverty and whatever.
Second, energy. Our focus on energy here is a sustainable development focus. So three things [in the energy area] are receiving attention. First over two billion people in the world live in what I would describe as a pre-industrial energy system. That pre-industrial energy system in today's world is even less sustainable than our fossil-fuel based system. It depends on depleting forests, and it is just plain inadequate for meeting people's needs for growth. So what are we going to do about these two billion people? How are we going to provide them with sustainable energy? Second, everybody recognizes that in this century there has to be a significant transition toward renewable energy. What sort of commitment can we get on this? This is not decided. This is one of the things that is being disputed, as to how firm should be the goal on renewables. And finally, of course, is energy renewal.
Third is agricultural. And I'm happy that this is being recognized because we are meeting in the heart of the region where they are facing the problems of what I would describe as, frankly, a relative neglect of agriculture both at the international level and at the national level. We just haven't put our energies behind food security and agriculture in the way we should have done. And I hope we learn this lesson and that we do something sufficiently serious. Unless you do this, unless you address land and water management, and food security and agriculture - you will never get anywhere on either managing disasters of the sort we have now [in southern Africa] or in poverty reduction. So that's the third.
Fourth is health. It is very intimately connected with the others - the water and sanitation side and the air quality side. And there is a growing concern that we have to address these issues of communicable diseases, the environmental basis of health, and not just focus on therapeutic issues.
The fifth area we focus attention on is what we call biodiversity. That is a very broad term to include eco-system management, for instance of oceans, of forest.
Do you have specific timetables, goals in these areas?
What we would look for is commitments to action, in terms of targets and timetables, in terms of partnerships between governments, private sector, local authorities, NGOs and others, and in terms of resources. Some of this will come in what the governments are negotiating. But a lot of it will come in what we are calling, and what a lot of people are calling "type two" initiatives.
These type two initiatives are not necessarily big public sector programs, but partnership-based programs quite often bringing governments together. A lot of these are being developed. You will find examples of some of the partnerships which are emerging because of Johannesburg in the summit web site (www.johannesburgsummit.org).
The third thing I want to focus attention on is that this summit is of course a summit of government leaders. But it is not just that. There is a lot happening beyond this. For instance, a whole lot of chief justices are getting together, because of the recognition that the judiciary has played a very important role in this area of environmental activism. For the first time we are actually getting judicial offers from 60 different countries coming together. We have parliamentarians coming together. We have a very large gathering of mayors of local authorities, because, in many ways, it is at the city level where one sees the tension between environment and development most clearly. And they have always been most responsive to Agenda 21 [the agenda established by the first 'Earth Summit' in Rio ten years ago]. We have about 6,000 municipalities which have done their own version of Agenda 21.
There is going to be a big gathering of corporate chief executive Officers. The corporate sector has really joined with great enthusiasm, not just to influence governments but to develop their own initiatives. There is a global reporting initiative, which is the standards set by corporations and NGOs {non-governmental organizations] for corporate reporting on social and environmental impact. There is an initiative on sustainable mining by some of the largest mining corporations in the world, joining up with NGOs and coming out with something which is acceptable to both of them.
There is another big initiative. The seven largest electricity utilities in the world are coming together, recognizing that you are not going to have sustainable energy unless you address the issue of rural electrification. What can they do?
A group of motor car companies, automobile companies in the U.S., and petroleum companies have come together to formulate what we call a sustainable mobility issue. People will want to move from place to place. How can we provide them with ways of moving which are more sustainable in the long term? This includes practically every major automobile company in the world: Ford, General Motors, Renault, the big Japanese companies, the big German companies. From the petroleum sector it includes BP and Shell.
So there are lots of things happening beyond what the governments are going to do. And I keep saying Johannesburg is really going to be a summit of the whole community, which has a capacity to contribute to this issue. And I hope therefore that people see it as a summit of not just government leaders, but of judiciaries, parliamentarians, NGO leaders, and so on.
But how are you going to ensure that this is not just a conference of politicians, corporate leaders, NGOs and experts? How are you planning to include the voices, for example, of the poor, of people from rural parts of Africa? How can they talk to each other?
That is the reason why we have a virtual exhibit [at the summit]. What is this virtual exhibit? A virtual exhibit is not trying to project big global solutions. Its focus is to look at partnership projects at the local level and bring knowledge and information about them to Johnnessburg so that others who are there can also see - in fact not just others in Johannesburg, because it will be available on the web at the www.johannesburgsummit.org site.
Let me give you an example. I have a village in India. They are actually going to connect with Johannesburg. They are going to talk about two things - rain-water harvesting and solar energy. They have been doing work in this area for twenty years now. We will connect them with people in Johannesburg. They will talk about it. People will see what problems they had; how they coped with the problems; what is it that the government could have done which should have helped them. And hopefully there will be people in Johannesburg who know enough about these possibilities to be able to converse with these people.
But it is more than that. There will be a project in Brazil, and let's say it is very similar - another project which is going to be connected to the virtual exhibit and talk about its experience. They can also see this because the whole thing is going to be web cast. Now we can't actually orchestrate it so the guy in Brazil can ask the guy in India a question via Johannesburg; that's a level of orchestration which is still a little difficult!
But I can imagine a time in the future when we will be able to do that. When we will actually be able to run a virtual conference where people in villages in Indian and in Brazil being able to talk with one another through a moderator, and in that sense bring the field to the center. And so a lot of our focus is on that. I hope that we have a lot of projects in Africa which should also become part of this virtual exhibit. And this virtual exhibit, the center of it, is in the main conference.
Ten years ago the 'Earth Summit' in Rio established a set of goals or an agenda for the world community in terms of the environment and development. Yet many NGOs argue that, although the Rio summit 10 years ago raised awareness, there has not been much progress on key issues identified by the delegates at that meeting? How much is the agenda at this Summit being shaped by Agenda 21, the set of priorities developed out Rio? And why should people have faith that more will happen this time?
Most of what we are talking about is Agenda 21. But, in some respects, it is going beyond Agenda 21. For instance we are much more conscious of the Aids epidemic now than we were then. We should have been more aware, but we were not. Globalization is a new issue. It is a word that was virtually unknown in 1992. There was no world wide web in 1992.
I think there is much more focus on issues of disaster management.
In fact, Agenda 21 has very few goals of a quantitative sort. It is more like a road map of the territory. And I see this as a route plan. A road map is opened ended. It doesn't tell you that you have to start here, and you have to end here.
But again, why should someone in a rural part of Africa expect that another world summit will help them, personally, in their local area? Will this summit result in outcomes that will help people hold their own governments accountable?
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All our experience is that this [summit process] really empowers people who are trying to make a difference at a local level. I've seen this even more in a completely different arena which I am responsible for, which is women's issues. Now this is classically a local issue, in terms of national legislation. But the fact that we have had these big global conferences on women's development has made a huge difference to what those women's groups could do at the national level. Because those women's groups could now hold their governments' accountable and responsible. To say [to their governments] you went to Bejing, and you said you are going to do this. What are you going to do about this?
The words 'sustainable development' are used a lot these days, but sometimes it is hard to define them. What is this concept of sustainable development. How do you define it?
I think basically, to sharpen it, we have to talk at the sectoral level. It is easier to talk about sustainable energy, than sustainable development. What does it mean to talk about sustainable energy? It means that you are not going to approach this simply from the perspective of pure environmental management, nor or we going to approach this simply from the perspective of: here is the demand for growth, how are we going to meet it? We need something which seeks to combine the two!
I give you example, which to me illustrates this: In my country, India, indoor air pollution caused by the way women cook - most women cook on wood stoves using fire wood inside the house - is a major problem. They ingest smoke, which is the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, and the estimate is that about 600,000 women in India die because of this. If I had an intervention which improved this form of cooking, I'd be solving several problems: I'd be solving a development problem; I'd be solving a problem of meeting energy needs because of rising numbers; I'd be solving an environmental problem of saving forests, because obviously the most efficient cooking means save the forest; and I'd be solving a social problem, which is women's health. That is what sustainability means. And I think it is going to be easier if we start talking of it in specific sectors rather than in general terms.
Similarly in agriculture. So I hope that we can get to grips with this, because otherwise everything will be sustainable development! Better movies in Hollywood will also be sustainable development. Movies effect peoples minds, and this and that. Obviously it becomes impossible if you keep stretching a word. It doesn't help. So I hope here we can focus.
Tomorrow: part II of the Nitin Desai interview focuses on the WSSD and Africa
"Drought is not just something the weather Gods are responsible for, it is a result of the neglect of agriculture, of land management and of other issues related to sustainable models for development." - Nitin Desai
Part II: Drought Demonstrates Need for Sustainable Development
