The Real Challenge for Rio+20

By Don de Silva Reprint | | Print |

LONDON, May 9 2012 (IPS) - The month before the 2012 Olympics, another event will take place, which will deal with more urgent issues concerning the present and the future of the earth. Unfortunately, this event has been bypassed by the information superhighway.

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, called Rio+20, will be held in Rio de Janeiro from June 20-22. The conference aims to assess the implementation of the resolutions of the Earth Summit of 1992.

I attended the first U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, which put the environment on the world agenda. Later I worked for more than a decade with the United Nations Environment Programme and for many years with several international environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

We have witnessed immense progress in implementing environmentally-sound practices. Today, there is a greater understanding of the links between the environment and development. ‘Sustainable development’ is a mantra among economic and finance ministers who once thought that environmental considerations were a luxury we could not afford. Green jobs are a serious economic option to tackle unemployment. Recycling is big business.

Environmental diplomacy has led to the creation of new positive, political alliances like the Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP). Over the last three decades Israel and countries like Libya have quietly, out of the glare of the world media, taken joint action to clean up the Mediterranean Sea.

During the early 1980s, environmental issues prompted the creation of the first-ever South Asian inter-government body, the South Asian Cooperative Environment Programme (SACEP). In turn, this development stimulated the creation of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), a tenuous but real thread of unity for the volatile region.

The Cinderella treatment that most governments and the media have given the Rio+20 preparations is a cause for real concern. The banking and economic crisis has sapped the will to act on environmental issues. Governments have by and large, failed to deliver on the commitments made at the 1992 Earth Summit.

Rio+20 does not promise to be as challenging an event as the first Earth Summit. This is a presidential election year in the United States and so it is unlikely that many heads of state will attend the event. The political and scientific fiascos of the Copenhagen Climate Conference (December 2009) are still fresh in the minds of environmental decision-makers.

However, there is clear scientific evidence that time is running out on our ability to wisely use the earth’s natural resources and biodiversity upon which our survival depends. This scenario challenges all of us to rise above our differences and narrow concerns and respond to the reality that the future of human life on earth depends on what we do, or fail to do, and soon.

Throughout the world, conflict over scarce resources is escalating rapidly. Rio+20 is a unique opportunity to make the fundamental transformational change in the way we think and live. This will require a degree of common action beyond anything we have yet experienced or imagined.

The decisions and policies that determine our effect on sustainability are motivated mainly by economic and financial considerations. To meet the environmental challenges at Rio+20 we will have to summon our deepest moral and ethical values.

The United Nations cannot do it alone. Nor can the plethora of environmental NGOs scattered across the world. The environmental movement needs a seismic mind-shift. The usual approach of strategies, actions plans, projects, and programmes has not been effective. The movement is bogged down in a mire of bureaucracy. It has to rekindle the sparks of commitment that led to the globalisation of the environmental movement.

We must realise that the environment depends on the “in-vironment”, the inner values that determine the way humankind uses the fragile resources of this planet.

If Rio+20 is to have any impact, spiritual and faith-based organisations will have to get into the act. Unfortunately, this important sector is also riven with disunity. They will have to shed their differences and work together to lead in facilitating changes in lifestyles and human behaviour to put the world on a path to sustainable living. The time for such organisations and movements has come. They will have to take on the root causes of the environmental and climate change crises, which are also the causes of the economic and financial crises, the inadequacies of our economic system, and the profligate values that drive it.

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* Don de Silva is a journalist, environmentalist, and communications specialist and the coordinator of Regional Information Programmes for the United Nations Environment Programme (dondes@changeways.net).