ENVIRONMENT: Momentum Builds for Successor to UNEP

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 19 1997 (IPS) - United Nations officials are encouraged that momentum is building to tranform the troubled U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) into a stronger, more credible organisation.

UNEP Executive Director Elizabeth Dowdeswell told IPS that she feels 1997, the fifth anniversary of the ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio which first gave impetus to UNEP’s creation, is the year in which her organisation will be able to meet the new challenges of globalisation.

“I think people are worried about globalisation, and they want an international organisation that is strong enough and that has the authority to be a counterweight to the World Trade Organisation (WTO),” Dowdeswell said.

As a result, she says, UNEP is pushing for the creation of a stronger World Environment Organisation, and will propose that such a body be approved by the U.N. General Assembly when it convenes a special session on the environment this June.

The challenges of globalisation in the era of the WTO, Dowdeswell said, are such that nations’ laws to protect the environment can be superceded if they are deemed to interfere with free trade.

This could easily lead to the adoption of the lowest common denominator as the new environmental standard, many environmental experts have argued here this week at the ‘Rio Plus Five’ environmental forum.

“Unfortunately, the WTO is strong and UNEP is weak,” says Charlie Clark of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). The consequence, he warned, could be that the WTO’s recommendations to uphold free-trade overrule the much smaller UNEP’s environmental enforcement.

Certainly many business leaders do not wish to see greater enforcement ability by any environmental agency. Bjorn Stigson of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development argues that there should be “no green protectionism”, and that there is always a danger that any environmental laws can be used to allow governments to set up protectionist trade regimes.

But more officials are coming to appreciate the need for an environmental check against free-trade rules. James Gustave Speth, administrator of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), told the Rio forum there is a need for “an effective partner at the international level to work with the WTO and other new entities.”

“The United Nations is the logical location for such an institution, and it could be built from an entirely rebuilt, expanded and renamed UNEP,” Speth says.

He says that the proposed World Environmental Organisation should be “capable of developing and monitoring international environmental agreements and promoting international environmental protection and cooperation.”

It may still be an uphill climb to win approval for such an organisation following the troubled start of UNEP. Several nations — including Canada, Germany and the United States — have sharply criticised the environmental agency, and have threatened to lead a pullout of major donor nations if UNEP does not institute wide- ranging reforms.

But Dowdeswell says she welcomes such questioning of UNEP, and believes that a review of the agency at this stage can only make it stronger. “Only if we deal with these questions in a more open way, rather than papering over them, will we be a much stronger organisation.”

The Rio forum Tuesday launched a charter which asks world nations to embrace “as a first step an international convention that provides an integrated legal framework for existing and future environmental and sustainable development law and policy.” It is also expected to support the idea of a strengthened UNEP in the recommendations that it will deliver to the United Nations in advance of the June special session.