The historic Rio+20 summit has come and gone, but it was hard to find a happy soul at the end of the environmental conference — North and South.
Not within the legion of bleary-eyed government negotiators from the 191 nations who met in an abortive attempt to find a breakthrough at the United Nations conference on sustainable development.
Again, not among the thousands of activists who denounced the summit that ended last week as “dead on arrival”. Not even organisers of the UN’s largest-ever event.
UN secretary-general of the conference Sha Zukang summed the mood of the delegates saying: “This is an outcome that makes nobody happy. My job was to make everyone equally unhappy.”
And so, in the end Rio+ 20 became a conference to decide to have even more conferences. At least it’s good for the government negotiators, politicians and hangers on because it will leave them with an extra dollar from their daily subsistence allowances (DSA).
Poignantly, that result was hailed as a success by the 100 heads of state who attended the event. Why?
Because given how environmental summits have failed in recent years as global economic turmoil squashes political will to take on climate and conservation issues, the mere fact of agreeing to talk again in the future constituted victory.
After the summit last week, I spoke to a top government bureaucrat, who indicated the result fell short on many fronts. What came out clear is that the outcome of the conference simply means both developing and rich countries’ leaders are laggards. How could they contend with rescheduling future summits than tangible results in the face of environment ruin?
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Faced with the real prospect of complete failure, negotiators who struggled for months to hammer out a more ambitious final document ended up opting for the lowest common denominator. Just hours before Rio+20 meeting opened, they agreed on a proposal that makes virtually no progress beyond what was signed at the original 1992 Earth Summit, removing the kind of contentious proposals activists contend were required to avoid an environmental meltdown.
The South Centre Policy executive director and a member of the UN Committee on Development Martin Khor said: “We’ve sunk so low in our expectations that reaffirming what we did 20 years ago is now considered a success.”
Why is it that we share a common future, but so little common ground?
Perhaps, the result from the lacklustre Rio+20 is that political leaders and their delegates in their wisdom or lack of it declined to bequeath it one of the grandiloquent titles normally attached to such things. It was not a Rio+20 Declaration, nor even a “roadmap”.
It was basically, clumsily, unimpressively — a “Rio+20 Outcomes Document”.
One can therefore deduce that the easy answer to the question of why government delegations could not aim higher was that the result reflected deep and stark divisions between developing and developed countries. And to some extent that was true.
Consequently, according to the Rio+20 Summit Outcomes, the word “reaffirm” is used 59 times in the 49-page document titled The Future We Want. They reaffirm the need to achieve sustainable development (but not mandating how); reaffirm commitment to strengthening international cooperation (just not right now); and reaffirm the need to achieve economic stability (with no new funding for the poorest nations).
Some of the major issues activists wanted to see in the document that didn’t make it in included a call to end subsidies for fossil fuels, language underscoring the reproductive rights of women, and some words on how nations might mutually agree to protect the high seas, areas that fall outside any national jurisdictions.
For example the concept of the green economy, originally intended to be at the heart of Rio+20 summit was supposed to put the world back on track to place sustainability at the heart of economic decision-making.
But developing countries including Zimbabwe saw it differently. President Robert Mugabe for starters, pointed out that money to transition to the green economy does not by and large grow on trees. Like many leaders in the developing world, the leaders were wary of anything that might impose rules on how they should develop.
Nevertheless, a simple “them and us” analysis of the failings of Rio+20 overlooked an important difference between 2012 and the time of the original Rio Earth Summit 20 years ago. Nor does it even do justice to the nuances of the green economy debate.
The world has changed and consequently so too has what one delegate termed “the arithmetic” of international negotiation, making the task of achieving consensus much harder.
We live in a world where environmental leadership on various issues is not solely the domain of developed countries, for example the country’s forest protection, land degradation, panning and reforestation efforts and our landmark climate change policy currently being debated among others.
Yes the leaders shared powerful examples of sustainable development in action. But what can make a difference are serious, implementable initiatives that will advance sustainable development. Going forward, these commitments must galvanise action where it really matters – on the ground.
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