ENVIRONMENT-U.N.: Activists Slam Negotiations on Rio Follow-Up

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 25 1997 (IPS) - The United Nations has failed to

agree on concrete measures to protect the environment, raising the threat that a special U.N. environmental session in June will accomplish little, environmental groups contend.

Three weeks of negotiations of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), which wrapped up here Friday, did not provide any significant progress on a wide range of issues, from climate control to water to forests, the groups claim.

“Most of the organisations here are extremely disappointed,” says Clif Curtis, political advisor for Greenpeace. The delegations present for the CSD, he argues, “have fought over a text that is increasingly becoming bland and weak…Unfortunately, what happens here sets the stage for a failure in June.”

“At this late stage, the government negotiators have come up with hardly any concrete action plans that their leaders could sign on to,” says Carole Saint-Laurent of the World Wide Fund for Nature. That makes it unlikely that there will be any breakthroughs until the 185 U.N. member states meet in June, she says.

There has been so little concrete achievement here over the past three weeks, adds Barbara Bramble of the U.S.-based National Wildlife Federation, that world leaders may not even be eager to appear at the June session of the General Assembly.

That session, held on the fifth anniversary of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, is supposed to adopt fresh commitments to follow up on the ‘Agenda 21’ plan for environmental protection drafted at Rio. But the proposals the CSD is submitting to the June session remain short on specifics, with most controversial issues either deleted from the current draft or “bracketed” to indicate ongoing disagreement.

Almost all language concerning financial commitments made to help the developing world protect the environment are either weak or remain unresolved, Bramble says.

That has in turn angered the South, which believes industrialised nations have no desire to maintain the obligation in Agenda 21 that they give 0.7 percent of their gross national products as development assistance to the developing world. (Developed nations currently spend less than 0.3 percent of their domestic products on such assistance.)

Even some U.N. environmental experts are discouraged by the lack of agreement at the CSD on financing and other key issues. “This is the most cynical negotiating I’ve seen,” says one U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“There is absolutely nothing of substance in the document,” she adds, noting that the language on financing is actually weaker than the commitments agreed to at Rio.

Not so, argues Mostafa Tolba, the Egyptian chairman of the CSD talks. “We still have a number of difficulties for sure, and we still have a number of brackets,” he says. “But there is a general feeling that (the current agreements) could be a good base for negotiations.”

Nations present for the talks have made progress on such key environmental issues as the need for clean water, the role of tourism and transport issues, Tolba says.

But for every gain, there have been many controversies that are no closer to being resolved, activists note.

Canada and the European Union came into the meeting with the hopes of securing agreement for a forestry convention that could help protect global forests. There was talk of an ‘eco-label’ for wood products made under environmentally friendly conditions. But that campaign, strongly resisted by the United States and Brazil, has stalled.

Tolba says that developing nations differed over what level to set for the reduction of greenhouse gases linked to global warming. Small island states most endangered by a rise in sea levels — a possible result of increased carbon dioxide emissions — want nations to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels that lead to greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels, while other countries seek only 5 percent or 15 percent reductions.

A group of largely oil-producing developing nations — including Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia — favour eliminating all language on reducing consumption of fossil fuels, which include oil, coal, and natural gas.

For some southern environmentalists, such standoffs simply reflect that governments in the South have had to jettison environmental commitments in order to stick to the pro- industrialisation policies of the global marketplace.

“The Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade has been the undoing of Rio,” argues Vandana Shiva, an environmental expert at the Malaysia-based Third World Network. As nations increasingly commit themselves to liberalised trade policies, she says, issues from the environment to social safety nets for the poor get scrapped.

“The state is being hijacked,” she says. “The reason of the state (under globalisation) is corporate protectionism,” which places southern governments in a weaker position to defend their environmental commitments compared to five years ago, Shiva contends.

“Governments are backtracking,” agrees Bella Abzug, president of the New York-based Women’s Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO). “Governments have allowed themselves to be overtaken by globalisation and privatisation.”

Yet even critics of the CSD know that governments have one more chance to come up with proposals on the environment, between now and the June ‘Earth Summit Plus Five’ session. “We’ve been through this before,” Tolba says, noting that previous negotiations have also had large disputes that were ultimately resolved in time for major conferences. Few of the environmentalists present here, however, hold hopes for similar breakthroughs soon.