WSSD: Activists and President Agree – Time to Put Ideas Into Action

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

JOHANNESBURG, Aug 26 2002 (IPS) - South African President Thabo Mbeki took a page from the book of leading environmentalists and focused on one word – implementation – as he opened the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) Monday.

Mbeki told world leaders unequivocally that the success or failure of the WSSD will depend on them developing a “real plan of implementation” to lift millions of the world’s poor out of poverty, one of the principle aims of this 10-day meeting, said to be the largest-ever U.N. gathering.

“The peoples of the world expect that this World Summit will live up to its promise of being a fitting culmination of a decade of hope, by adopting a practical programme for the translation of the dream of sustainable development into reality,” Mbeki told delegates at the plush Sandton Convention Centre.

His appeal was echoed a few hours later by a coalition of environmental groups at a press conference.

“For sustainable development, we need rules that assure just development for all. This is key if the summit is to be the implementation summit,” said Daniel Mittler, WSSD coordinator for Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), one of the largest environmental grassroots networks.

“Targets and timetables must be set by governments at this summit. Governments must say how they will achieve the goals of sustainable development, and how much they are prepared to spend for them,” he added.

Environmentalists have identified 11 test cases to assess how far governments at the WSSD will be willing to travel on the road to implementing sustainable development.

They include access to water and sanitation for the world’s poor, increased use of renewable and clean sources of energy and a clear commitment that human health and the environment come before world trade.

Over 100 world leaders, nearly 5,000 government delegates and more than 3,000 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are on the list of attendees for the WSSD, which runs until Sep. 4.

In addition, close to 60 chief justices from around the world and nearly 50 chief executive officers of leading multinational companies are here to participate in some of the more than 400 events to be held at the “official” convention centre and at a parallel gathering for civil society groups.

The South African government has tightly secured the main summit venue, with numerous police officers and bomb-sniffing dogs stationed at entrances and helicopters criss-crossing the sky above.

The summit’s secretary-general, Nitin Desai, told journalists on the eve of the conference that the mission of Johannesburg was to translate the pledges made at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro into action.

“The Earth Summit in Rio was about changing the way people think about development and the environment,” he said. “Johannesburg is about changing the way we act. It’s about implementation.”

This is also one of the primary demands of the Group of 77, which represents 133 developing nations. “This is not a meeting to discuss philosophical concepts. We are here to get commitments – and certainly in writing,” a diplomat from one of those nations told IPS.

At the Rio summit, world leaders agreed to back Agenda 21, a document that provided a road map on how the world should proceed to help lift millions of people out of poverty via economic development that does not harm the planet.

As the international development agency Oxfam points out, failure to push through a concrete plan of action now will result in more human misery.

If present development trends continue till 2015, Oxfam estimates that “there will be 10 million child deaths compared with a target of 4.6 million a year (and) at least 65 developing countries will fail to achieve the objective of halving poverty”.

In Africa, it adds, “the number of poor people in 2015 will be higher than in 1990”.

A recent U.N. report highlights other issues that have not been addressed since the Earth Summit, despite commitments to the contrary. They include estimates that water will become scarce for nearly half of the world’s population by 2025, more forests will disappear and global warming will worsen due to more greenhouse gas emissions.

Such dire predictions have not swayed some developed nations to commit themselves to concrete action in the discussions and negotiations leading to the summit.

But on the eve of the meeting, there were reports that other developed countries were lobbying hard to delete or change the language in a draft of the summit’s final plan of action.

They were reportedly focused on financing of development, fair trade between developed and developing nations, access to water and sanitation and reversing environmental degradation.

The United States was identified as the leader of this pack. The U.S. administration “is actively seeking to water down the text (of the draft plan of action) and undermine the negotiations in cooperation with the U.N. secretariat,” said Michael Dorsey of the Sierra Club.