The Hindu : Critical issues

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Aug 26, 2002

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Critical issues

MORE THAN 100 heads of state and Government will be meeting in Johannesburg this week at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. For a world weary of United Nations summits this may seem like yet another ritualistic gathering where world leaders will fly in, make their speeches and return to their capitals. But while the chances are that the WSSD will not produce concrete results of any note, the issues on the agenda are critical for the lives of future generations. A failure to act now pushes global and national environmental deterioration closer to the point of irreversibility.

The Johannesburg summit will be held exactly a decade after the Rio de Janeiro summit produced Agenda 21and the Rio Charter, which were supposed to be landmark agreements that would guide the Governments of the world in fulfilling their "common but differentiated" responsibility in promoting sustainable development. The 1992 Rio summit generated a tremendous amount of public awareness about environment issues — particularly on climate change, degradation of forests and the consequences of unequal and profligate consumption — but this has not been transformed into remedial action. No fig leaf can hide the fact that Agenda 21 has been a complete failure. National, regional and local plans have been prepared in a number of countries, but other than isolated examples few have been seriously implemented. The fact is that the environment has lost its high profile on the national and global political agendas, in spite of the fact that ecological stress has worsened in the past decade. In the developed countries, only in the European Union do green issues have any constituency. In the U.S., the President, George W. Bush, would, if he could, be rolling back environmental regulations even more rapidly than he has during the past couple of years. In the developing countries, Governments are content with railing against the developed world while they continue to be indifferent even where they can act, like in depletion of water resources. Global environment agreements that have been signed are being ignored as well, the best example of this has been the U.S. attitude towards the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. The only successes in rich and poor countries have come about when citizens' groups have taken the initiative or the courts have stepped in to rectify negligence of the Executive. In such a situation it is difficult to see the Johannesburg summit making a substantial difference to national and global policies on the environment. True to form, negotiators have not been able to resolve their differences about a plan of implementation — Agenda 21 by another name — which is supposed to emerge from the WSSD. This is true as well of the text of a proposed Johannesburg Declaration, which will only be a Rio Charter 10 years later.

If the WSSD is yet important, it is because it provides an opportunity to world leaders to ask of themselves and of each other why, despite the profile and promise of the 1992 Rio summit the decade that followed was such a failure from the perspective of sustainable development. Yet, leaders of two countries, each important in its own way for the future of global environment protection efforts, have decided not to participate in the Johannesburg summit. While Mr. George Bush Sr. was brave enough to attend the Rio summit in 1992 despite the U.S. being cast as the environmental villain of the world, Mr. Bush Jr. has decided not to travel to Johannesburg. Just as no global climate treaty can work without the participation of the world's biggest polluter, no attempt at promoting sustainable development can go far without a political signal from the highest level in the U.S., which remains the largest consumer of natural resources. The Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, too has decided to stay away from the WSSD, leaving it to the Foreign Minister, Yashwant Sinha, to lead the Indian delegation. It has been a long journey from the 1972 Stockholm U.N. environment conference where Indira Gandhi made her famous "poverty is the biggest polluter" speech, to 2002 when the Prime Minister of India is turning his back on global efforts to protect the environment and promote sustainable development.

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