No single meeting can change the world. But the organisers of the Earth Summit, one of the largest gatherings ever of the tribal elders of Homo sapiens, want to do nothing less than change the direction of our economic development. The purpose is to begin installing a system of planetary housekeeping that can preserve the Earth’s atmosphere, soils and biology in a state fit to sustain the 10 billion people who will be living on it within a century.
The summit will last from 3 to 14 June. In the final two days, heads of state will sign an Earth Charter – a declaration of basic principles of sustainable development – and a lengthy document called Agenda 21 that will set out a list of tasks for the coming century. These documents have been largely agreed in advance, at a series of meetings in Geneva and New York over the past two years. But crucial details remain to be sorted out at the start of the summit.
The heads of state will also probably sign two legally binding conventions on climate change and biodiversity, which are being negotiated right up to the eve of the summit. The successful implementation of the conventions and Agenda 21 will depend on the summit establishing a body to oversee the planet’s progress and an agency to channel funds from the West into projects in the Third World.
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The two conventions will join others signed in recent years on other global environment issues. These include the Basel Convention on Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes, which came into force earlier this month (This Week, 9 May), and the Vienna Convention and subsequent Montreal Protocol on protection of the ozone layer. Others may follow after Rio on managing forests and fighting desertification.
Much of the pressure for the Earth Summit is the result of Western concern about global environmental issues such as the greenhouse effect, ozone holes and loss of tropical forests. But the Third World nations – led by the likes of Malaysia, Brazil and India – come to the summit with their own demands for a fairer share of the world’s resources and with a conviction that their efforts to improve the prosperity of their people are being blamed by the rich nations for environmental crises.
But in the past year, since the summit was called, growing Western concern about economic recession has caused politicians to think again about their commitment to planetary salvation. This is particularly true in the US, but now extends to Germany, a strong proponent of environmental measures two years ago, and the European Community, which two weeks before the summit was still unable to agree on a common approach. In recent weeks, Japan has emerged as the most enthusiastic advocate of the summit among the developed nations.
So how do the politics of the summit measure up to the science of the key issues in both environment and development, from climate change and biodiversity to technology transfer and trade?
Climate change
Much of the impetus for the summit has come from the sense of global peril created by the prospect of climate change caused by the release of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel, and forest destruction. Warnings among climate modellers in the late 1980s resulted in UN agencies establishing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC’s science working group established a bedrock of academic opinion of the likely impact of the greenhouse effect that triggered negotiations for a convention. Two other working groups – one assessing the impact of the greenhouse effect, the other looking at ways of minimising the effect itself – made slower progress. Even so, few scientists would disagree with the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development (the Bruntland commission, which first proposed the summit) when it declared last month: ‘Rising average world temperatures and sea levels could cause severe economic and social dislocation within the lifetime of people over 30, worsening international tensions and increasing the risk of conflicts among and between nations.’
An IPCC report this year stated that air pollution from sulphur dioxide is reducing warming over much of the northern hemisphere. It also found that the warming effect of CFC gases (currently being phased out to prevent destruction of the ozone layer) is cancelled out by thinning of the ozone layer, which cools the planet’s surface.
These discoveries have provided ammunition for the claims, particularly of American industrialists, that the greenhouse effect is an overrated problem – an interpretation that IPCC scientists vehemently deny. But it has also undermined an argument put forward until recently by the US government, that its reductions in CFC manufacture would cut that country’s overall contribution to global warming without any need for limits on carbon dioxide.
Any realistic strategy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions must begin with two facts. Four-fifths of emissions arise from burning fossil fuels, mostly in power stations and vehicles. Secondly, the quarter of the world’s population living in the developed world are responsible for three-quarters of those emissions, and among these, per capita emissions in the US and Canada are twice those in Japan and Western Europe. This is why there is such dismay at the US’s refusal to join most other industrial nations in a commitment to the modest target of stabilising emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000.
Cuts in emissions will require industrial nations to combine a new culture of energy conservation (probably backed by stringent energy taxes) with research into alternative methods of energy production that do not involve burning fossil fuels, such as solar and wind power.
The Confederation of British Industry says that cuts in energy use of 30 per cent are economically feasible within five years. Similar cuts in domestic use are possible, according to the Association for the Conservation of Energy. But there may be greater problems in the fast-growing transport sector, which now accounts for around 30 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions.
Recent studies have demonstrated even greater potential for emerging nations such as India, China and Brazil to improve energy efficiency, much of it through improved management and maintenance of machinery. But many nations of the poor South argue that the greenhouse problem is a creation of rich Northern nations, and any help that poor nations provide towards a remedy should be paid for by the rich with either cash or the donation of advanced energy-saving technologies.
Pressure from the US and some Third World nations has forced the removal from Agenda 21 of specific support for national energy planning measures, such as energy efficiency standards for everything from industrial machinery to refrigerators and cars.
Biodiversity
The idea for a biodiversity convention arose a decade ago among scientists at the World Conservation Union (IUCN), was later promoted by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and finally adopted by the Earth Summit. Along the way it has changed from a treaty aimed exclusively at preserving wild areas with exceptional biological diversity into one aimed also at the ‘sustainable development of biological resources’.
This dual track creates tensions. Western conservationists see the great surviving centres of the planet’s biodiversity, such as rainforests and wetlands, as part of a global heritage. Third World governments see them as national sources ripe for development. The convention combines recognition of national rights, which breaks the long-standing tradition that genetic resources cannot be owned, with a duty on nations to make those resources available to others on agreed terms.
One example of how such deals might be done is the agreement signed last year between the government of Costa Rica and the American pharmaceuticals company, Merck. The company can prospect for plants containing chemicals with pharmaceutical properties in return for funding conservation and a national biological research centre.
Many Third World countries still look on the developed world’s concern about conservation as a way of extracting money from Western governments. So the success of the biodiversity convention may depend on agreements made at the summit on funding of conservation programmes – and on meeting Third World demands for access to biotechnology techniques and for royalties on any products developed by biotechnologists from genes found within their borders.
The biodiversity treaty may also address rules for the safe release of genetically engineered organisms. The US ‘has been making a big deal of this’, according to Deborah Lamb, one of Britain’s negotiators. Neither it nor Japan accept the view of other nations that separate health and safety rules are required for genetic engineering to prevent the accidental release of experimental bioengineered organisms into the environment.
Desertification and land degradation
With environmental attention directed towards tropical rainforests and emissions of carbon dioxide, many of the poorest African nations on the margins of the Sahara had felt left out of pre-summit negotiations in New York in March, and so fought back, demanding a convention to address desertification, with a price tag on its implementation of perhaps $3 billion a year.
But the rest of the world is wary. Nobody is quite sure what, if any, benefits came from a previous anti-desertification programme launched by UNEP in the late 1970s. In addition, analysis of satellite pictures reveals the general advance of deserts, which has been assumed for the past two decades, to be a myth.
There are serious problems of land degradation in some arid zones, though rarely close to the deserts themselves, where population levels are very low. The danger is that the collapse of the myth of advancing deserts, and the failure of UNEP to analyse what is happening in arid lands, will leave these real issues unaddressed.
Agenda 21 will call for a modest programme of research ‘to determine the capacity of land, and the interactions among various land uses and environmental processes’. But a meeting called last December by the International Council of Science Unions, which represents science institutions round the world, to discuss the Earth Summit, called for a more ambitious programme. It wanted to create a global system for monitoring both land use and the carbon content of soil. The latter, the meeting said, would establish the capacity of soil to absorb carbon dioxide and also provide ‘an indicator of soil fertility and agricultural sustainability’.
Deforestation
Forests are one of the planet’s critical natural resources. They contain half of the world’s species, act as a ‘sink’ for atmospheric carbon dioxide, and provide a sustainable source for many forest products, from timber and rattan to fruits, traditional medicines and meat. Yet each year some 170 000 square kilometres of tropical forests are lost. Some nations are destroying their trees at a rate of 5 per cent per year. In addition, many natural forests are being replaced with monoculture plantations, of eucalyptus for instance, which hold carbon dioxide and yield timber, but provide few other forest products and cannot support traditional forest communities.
The burning or eventual rotting of wood from cleared or logged forests may release roughly a fifth as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as the burning of fossil fuels. But there is uncertainty about this figure – and hence about the viability of proposals to plant new forests to soak up the gas. A new IPCC study should provide more accurate figures next year.
Forested nations fear that a forest convention might limit their ability to exploit a major national resource. The Malaysian government, which is presiding over the rapid destruction of pristine forest in its province of Sarawak on the island of Borneo, has led opposition by developing nations to the idea of a convention, and this scuppered the idea of its inclusion at Rio.
More recently, discussions have resumed and may lead to a declaration of principles at Rio, to form the basis for a future convention. This would, like the biodiversity convention, combine commitments to conservation with ideas of national rights to exploit the forests. But Western conservationists are wary of this approach: they say a weak agreement might undermine tougher forest conservation policies enforced by aid and lending agencies such as the World Bank.
Mountains
The steeply sloping sides of mountain regions are home to a tenth of the world’s population, including many of the poorest. Soil erosion and forest loss in mountain ranges from the Himalayas to the Andes and the Alps threaten livelihoods, cause major disasters such as landslides and upset river flows. Agenda 21 envisages international efforts, costing $13 billion per year, to ensure ‘appropriate’ use of mountain lands by the year 2000. Measures would include the creation of national parks and incentives for farmers to preserve their environments and take up new means of employment.
Oceans
Land-based pollution is a major source of contamination of the oceans. But proposals from conservationists for a treaty governing pollution of the oceans – a global version of the agreements adopted for the Mediterranean in the 1970s and the Baltic earlier this year – have not been seriously discussed by delegates in the run-up to Rio.
A new impetus may await the conclusion of major science programmes looking at ocean circulations systems and exchange of chemicals between the oceans and atmosphere. These should clarify how much carbon dioxide they absorb (current estimates vary between 20 and 40 per cent of total atmospheric pollution) and how much they moderate global warming by absorbing heat and ‘burying’ it in the ocean depths.
The UN’s science, environment and meteorology agencies have all called on the Earth Summit to adopt a strong resolution urging countries to establish a Global Ocean Monitoring System to track trends and identify responses to environmental and climate change. But funding of such a system may prove elusive.
Population
Population growth is one of the most explosive issues at Rio. With nine out of every ten children in coming decades likely to be born in the Third World, Western nations say population control is essential to global survival. But a single child born in the rich world will consume between three and four times as much of the world’s resources as all nine in the Third World. For the developing world, overconsumption in the rich world is the number one issue.
Early drafts of Agenda 21 proposed linking poverty, overconsumption in rich countries and rapidly growing populations in the Third World as common interlinked barriers to sustainable development. But at negotiations in New York in March, the US attempted to veto any mention of over-consumption, whereupon several developing nations refused to allow discussion of population control.
The Brundtland commission, meeting in London last month, criticised Western nations for failing to give more than 2 per cent of their aid budgets to population measures. Serious consideration of population policy by the UN may, nonetheless, be put off until a major population conference in 1994.
Poverty
Poverty, like overconsumption, is generally agreed to cause environmental destruction as people in absolute poverty ravage their natural environment to survive today, even though they may know they are destroying the prospects of future generations. Beyond that, the growing gap between the rich and poor of the world is an international scandal. The world’s richest billion people are, according to an estimate this year from the UN, 150 times as wealthy as the poorest billion – a disparity that has doubled in the past 30 years.
But can poverty best be tackled by national economic growth on the Western model – by privatising resources, liberalising trade and relying on wealth to trickle down to the poorest? Or would giving new powers to local communities to control their own surroundings and repel unwanted outsiders work better? And what are the impacts of such choices on other key issues such as population growth and environmental degradation? These are among the great underlying questions that will scarcely be raised by national delegations in Rio.
Funding
The secretariat to the Earth Summit estimates that paying for the shopping list of actions proposed under Agenda 21 in the Third World alone would cost more than $600 billion per year for the foreseeable future, roughly twice what the US now spends on defence. (There was no attempt to quantify the bill for converting the economies of the developed world.)
About a fifth of this, or $125 billion per year, it suggested, should be paid for in aid from the developed world, of which nearly half could come from existing aid programmes, leaving an additional $70 billion to be found. This (coincidentally or not) is the amount of money that would be generated if the rich nations fulfilled the long-standing UN target of committing 0.7 per cent of their GDP to overseas aid.
The problem with all these calculations, say environmentalists, is that they treat environmental measures as expensive technologies or methods that have to be added to existing development projects. They take no account of benefits that would accrue from a cleanup (the value of the fish that return to a river, for instance). But nor, more critically, do they encourage the adoption of more environmentally friendly ways of economic development than those followed by Western economies.
However, in London last month, the Brundtland commission declared that, at a minimum, the developed world should commit itself at the Earth Summit to providing an extra $10 billion in 1993. Anything less, believes the commission, would condemn the summit as a political failure.
The rich nations are insisting that most of this ‘green aid’ must go through the Global Environment Facility, set up two years ago by the World Bank and the UN Development and Environment Programs and restructured last month to increase the involvement of Third World governments.
Technology transfer
Technology transfer stands beside transfer of cash as a central demand of the Third World at the Earth Summit. But there are serious criticisms of the notion that technology provides some ‘magic bullet’ for the less developed countries, and of the idea prevalent in the Third World that Western patent laws systematically impede the flow of technology. The real challenge, says Kazuo Matsushita of the Earth Summit secretariat, is ‘how to increase the capacity of developing countries to select, fortify, adjust and develop their own technologies according to their local needs and conditions’.
Trade
The liberalisation of international trade, as envisaged by the Uruguay Round of negotiations on the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) is a double-edged weapon in the war on environmental destruction and poverty. Freer trade could, as GATT officials claim in a report on environment and trade published in February, give the poor nations better access for their goods to the markets of the rich world, thus raising income for environmental protection and alleviating poverty. But it could also increase the pace at which nations plunder natural resources, especially if a freeing of trade causes prices of commodities to fall. The World Wide Fund for Nature, in a response to the GATT report, has insisted that if free trade is to be of environmental benefit it must also be fair trade. If Third World countries can charge fair prices for their goods then they can, as Western nations increasingly do for their manufactured goods, include the costs of environmental protection in the price.
Current drafts of Agenda 21 and the London statement of the Brundtland commission both back freer trade. But neither follows the market logic adopted by GATT director-general Arthur Dunkel when he argues that countries with large forests should be able to charge the rest of the world for the ‘carbon absorption services’ that these forests provide to the planet.
Planetary accounting
‘No business can survive without a capital account. Neither can the planet,’ says the Brundtland commission. Last month in London, the commission called on governments and international institutions, such as the World Bank and the OECD, to introduce by 1995 new standards for national accounting that indicate where natural capital, such as rainforest, is being used up. Recent studies suggest that the fast economic growth of Indonesia, for instance, looks much more modest if the accounting is adjusted to allow for the deterioration of the ‘capital stock’ of rainforests.
Along similar lines, there are also calls for the adoption of measures of national development that do not rely on crude economic indexes, such as GDP. The UN’s Human Development Report, published in April, introduced a Human Development Index based on life expectancy, adult literacy, years of schooling and the real purchasing power of income. The results drastically downgrade many Gulf oil states, where income is good and the currency stable but social services are poor.
The United Arab Emirates, for instance, is the 12th richest nation on Earth, if GDP per head of population is the measure. But with a literacy rate of around 50 per cent, it slumps to 57th in the Human Development Index. Oman has a per capita income 2.5 times that of Costa Rica. But who would say its people are better off when they have an average life expectancy nine years less than Costa Ricans, child mortality is more than twice as high and the literacy rate is one-third that in Costa Rica.
Institutions after Rio
Western nations have generally opposed the establishment of new institutions which, they say, take too long to get started. But they also fear that any bodies established at Rio would be too democratic, providing one nation, one vote, rather than the one dollar, one vote of bodies such as the World Bank. Now, provided funding passes through the revamped Global Environment Facility this is less of a problem for them.
What seems likely to emerge now is a new Commission on Sustainable Development (a kind of permanent Brundtland commission) to assess and report on post-Rio progress. The Commission would report to the UN General Assembly and a reformed version of the one of the UN’s moribund bodies, the Economic and Social Council.
The Brundtland commission backs this idea and the creation of an Earth Council, an independent watchdog operating outside the UN system. The council is the pet project of summit secretary-general Maurice Strong, who sees it as an Amnesty International for the environment.
Strong has canvassed industrialists to pay for the council, which he would be a strong contender to chair. But there will be strong suspicion among citizens’ groups about the establishment of any environmental watchdog that is backed by industry. They fear that international companies, which are helping to pay for the summit itself, are getting an easy ride in negotiations, with no new watchdogs proposed to monitor or control their activities.
Fred Pearce will be reporting from Rio on the Earth Summit for New Scientist.
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FROM JAMBOREE TO RALLY: THE ORIGINS OF THE SUMMIT
Twenty years ago, the UN Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm. It was as much a jamboree for environmentalists as a serious political event. It ended with a declaration that was high on rhetoric but sparse on detail or commitments. But it did lead to the formation of the UN Environment Programme, which was headed by Maurice Strong, the director-general of both the Stockholm conference and this year’s Earth Summit.
Often described as the UN’s environmental conscience, UNEP has organised misguided efforts to halt desertification, as well as brokering the Montreal Protocol to fight ozone destruction, and setting up negotiations for a convention on biodiversity, which is likely to be signed in Rio. But it has failed to tackle other problems such as deforestation and global warming and was largely bypassed in the organisation of the Rio summit.
In 1983, the UN General Assembly, on which all the world’s governments sit, set up the World Commission on Environment and Development, known as the Brundtland commission after its chairwoman, Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. The aim was to combine consideration of escalating environmental problems with the stark findings on North-South relations contained in the Brandt report of 1980.
Brundtland’s report, Our Common Future, published in 1987, declared ‘the time has come for a marriage of economy and ecology, so that governments and their people can take responsibility not just for environmental damage, but for the policies that cause the damage. Some of these policies threaten the survival of the human race.’ Brundtland used the phrase ‘sustainable development’ to describe how the world must ensure that economic development does not endanger the ability of future generations to enjoy the fruits of the Earth.
The Brundtland commission ended with a call for a summit to address these questions. Unlike the Stockholm conference, the Rio summit will bring development issues fully into the environmental equation. Its urgency has been increased by the escalating concern about rainforest destruction and global warming, which received only passing attention in Our Common Future, about the debt crisis in the Third World, and about the growing income gap between rich and poor nations.
