World leaders seek to put planet's economy on a safer path
THE danger of human activity outrunning the capacity of the Earth to cope with it will bring about the biggest ever gathering of world leaders in one place at the Earth Summit, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, which begins here today.
Heads of state and government from nearly 150 countries, from the United States to the Maldive Islands, will be asked to sanction the most ambitious of all initiatives—a new future for the planet.
They will be asked to agree a new environmental path for the world economy, to prevent the Earth’s life-support systems, its atmosphere, fertile soil, rivers and oceans,. breaking down under the stresses of unrestrained industrial growth and exploding world population.
History offers few hopeful precedents for all the world’s leaders agreeing on anything, and the omens are not good from the long preparatory negotiations about the summit agenda, a 750-page detailed plan for the Earth’s future, called Agenda 21.
The talks have been largely polarized by a split between the industrialized countries of the North and the developing countries of the South, over how much the South should be paid to ensure that its future economic growth does not wreak environmental havoc.
Even heads of state and government, horse-trading together in the ante-rooms of Rio, may be unable to paper this over.
Yet only such a conclave of world leaders could generate the political will to bring about the fundamental shift in economic practice that is now necessary, according to the conference’s moving spirits, the 22 members of the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, the prime minister of Norway.
Their 1987 report, Our Common Future, which led directly to the summit being called, graphically presented the accumulating signs of environmental and human strain - global warming, the threat to the ozone layer, disappearing species, deforestation and desertification, as well as he ever-deepening poverty in the Third World — as symptoms of a single problem, the exhaustion by human being of the carrying capacity of he Earth.
Although economic growth has been responsible for much environmental degradation, it had to continue, the Brundtland commissioners said in their report, or he destitution of much of the Third World would get even worse.
Their solution was a new form of growth: sustainable development, or growth which does not compromise the prospects of future generations.
Its key principle is never to take an economic decision without regard to its environmental consequences.
Getting the world onto a sustainable developrnent path is the summit’s avowed purpose. The Rio meeting, with its conglomeration of world leaders of every faith and political creed, its parallel conference of 15,000 environmentalists, its media circus, its photo-opportunities with President Bush, promises to become a jamboree where there are almost as many agendas as people.
Yet the organizers have not lost sight of sustainable development as its central objective.
"The Earth Summit is a summit about economics," says the conference’s secretary-general, Maurice Strong, a Canadian millionaire businessman-turned-environmentalist.
Mr Strong, 63, a member of the Brundtland commission, is the man behind Agenda 21, which is a detailed blueprint for putting sustainable development into action in every country.
Originally, Mr Strong had hoped that it would become a binding work programme for the world, with fixed targets and timetables. This has proved hopelessly ambitious.
There has been extensive agreement over Agenda 21’s contents, but fierce arguments too, the biggest over the question of population growth, which developing countries often regard as an issue with racist and imperialist overtones.
The Brundtland commissioners admitted that it was their most difficult question, but they did not shrink from it and it figured prominently in their report.
However, in resolution 44/228 of the UN General Assembly, which in 1989 called for the Earth Summit to be held in response to Our Common Future, the question of population was absent.
Mr Strong has made sure it is included in Agenda 21, but it does not have a section to itself, and there has been fierce criticism of its lack of prominence.
The most intractable question, however, is money. Mr Strong has always said that for Agenda 21 to be put into practice in the Third World there would have to be a substantial increase in global North-South aid flows, currently running at $55 billion (30 billion pounds): the figure of an extra $70 billion annually is the cost his policy-makers have arrived at.
Taking their cue from him, the developing countries, which are known collectively as the Group of 77, have demanded it. The industrialized countries of the North, principally the members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development have refused.
Source : The Straits Times, June 1, 1992
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