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ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Earth Summit Score Card, 15 Years On

Fabiana Frayssinet

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 20 2007 (IPS) - Fifteen years after the 1992 Earth Summit, Brazil is again playing host to representatives from around the world who are assessing the results of the actions that arose from that landmark conference.

The Rio + 15 Initiative, held Wednesday and Thursday in Rio de Janeiro, gathered around 100 leading figures from the political, business and academic sectors as well as international bodies and non-governmental organisations.

Pedro Moura Costa, one of the organisers, said the aim was to “stimulate the contribution of all sectors of society and industry to the goal of curbing climate change.”

“A lot of thinking needs to be done about what progress has been made in the area of climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions,” Moura Costa, the head of EcoSecurities, an international company specialising in promoting projects to cut greenhouse gas emissions, told IPS.

“That’s the aim of our meeting: to reflect and discuss what worked and what didn’t work” out of the agreements reached at the Earth Summit, the expert said, after describing the 1992 Summit as “the historic framework” that kicked off a series of global efforts to fight pollution and global warming.

Alfredo Sirkis, co-founder of Brazil’s Green Party and one of the participants at Rio + 15, acknowledges the important role of the Earth Summit or United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

“Now there is worldwide mobilisation and activism on a scale that did not exist before,” Sirkis told IPS. For example, nine states in the United States, seven of which are governed by the Republican Party, have signed up to the Kyoto Protocol, which obliges industrialised countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by five percent.

U.S. President George W. Bush, of the Republican Party, withdrew his country from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, shortly after taking office. His predecessor Bill Clinton (1993-2001) had signed the treaty, which was approved in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, entered into force in 2005, and committed signatory countries to reducing emissions by at least five percent between 1990 and 2012.

Sirkis, who is also head of the OndAzul Foundation, which works mainly on water resources conservation, holds that there was much more that “didn’t work” than “did work” among the outcomes of the Earth Summit.

“In 1992 the greenhouse effect was seen as something far off in the future, and now it is a pressing problem. Climate change is here, and I believe there is a sense of urgency today that didn’t exist before,” he said.

The Rio + 15 Initiative, organised by EcoSecurities, had Brazilian Minister of Environment and Development Marina Silva scheduled to speak on the first day, but she did not show up.

In her stead, the executive secretary of the Brazilian Inter-Ministerial Commission on Global Climate Change, José Miguez, delivered an extremely positive evaluation of the 15-year interval since the 1992 Earth Summit.

Miguez told IPS that one sign of progress was the surge in the number of projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), now totalling 2,400 projects in over 60 countries, which could reduce gas emissions by about two billion tons of carbon dioxide.

The CDM, originally a Brazilian proposal, allows industrialised nations to obtain carbon credits by investing in clean energy projects in developing countries.

More than half of global energy production is at present fuelled by oil, gas or coal, the main contributors to the greenhouse effect.

Via the Kyoto Protocol, which incorporates the CDM, several countries have committed themselves to developing appropriate technology to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

Miguez believes the main challenge now is to bring Australia and the United States, which is responsible for 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, into the international fight to save the environment.

“I think that in a very short time, just 15 years, we have succeeded in changing people’s mentality. A great many people, including engineers, economists and lawyers, are working hard indeed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. There is a huge structural change going on that we cannot evaluate completely today,” he said.

Israel Klabin, head of the Brazilian Foundation for Sustainable Development (FBDS), is less upbeat. “Although the Earth Summit created mechanisms to reduce emissions of contaminating gases, by themselves these are not enough,” he told IPS.

“The goal in 1992 was to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000, but now the situation is completely different, because emissions have doubled,” he said.

Experts also discussed alternative methods of energy production, including biofuels, and the technological changes industries will have to make.

The Rio + 15 final document will be presented in December at Bali, Indonesia, when the environment ministers of more than 180 countries, signatories to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change produced by the 1992 Earth Summit, will meet to discuss goals and policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions after 2012.