The UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals are projected onto UN headquarters. UN Photo/Cia Pak

By Felix Dodds
UNITED NATIONS, May 30 2017 (IPS)

Over the past five years, I have written with a number of co-authors the history of the sustainable development movement at the global level prior to the first UN Conference on Human Environment held in 1972 through the 1992 Earth Summit and Rio+20 to the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement. I like to think of these books as the ‘Vienna Café Trilogy’ after the café in the basement of the United Nations headquarters in New York, where many deals are done over coffee. Also, with deference to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts, this trilogy may also have future books.

In light of the anniversaries and the political landscape in which we currently find ourselves, I thought it would a good time to review where we are and the state of the discourse on sustainable development.

Writing these books did give me a broader perspective than that of living in the moment. The journey towards a planet which can sustain our consumption and production patterns has been a long one. At each advance, we have faced the reality that policy development in any particular area is impacted by global reality in other areas. After the first UN Conference on Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, the world had to deal with the impacts of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. This saw oil prices rise from US$3 per barrel to US$12 globally, rising even higher in the United States. This energy crisis due to the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries oil embargo. This negatively impacted on the implementation of the Stockholm agreements.

“The roadmap that started in Stockholm, continued in Rio and Johannesburg and in Rio-20 must now become a reality. Our essential unity as peoples of the Earth must transcend the differences and difficulties which still divide us. You are called upon to rise to your historic responsibility as custodians of the planet in taking the decisions in the next year that will unite rich and poor, North, South, East and West, in a new global partnership to ensure our common future I ask you to work together to make it such for your time has come to make those changes.” - Maurice Strong in 2014
The 1992 Earth Summit, birthed Agenda 21 – a blueprint to take us through to the twenty-first century as well as securing the conventions on Climate Change and Biodiversity and the Rio Declaration. The Declaration, consisted of a set of 27 principles to guide countries included the principle of ‘the polluter pays,’ which recently was effective in holding British Petroleum (BP) accountable in the Deep Horizon disaster and serves as a foundational principle of the climate change Green Fund.  These agreements also had a backdrop, this being the First Gulf War and the increase again in oil prices as well as the stabilization of Eastern Europe after the breakup of the former Soviet bloc.

Promises to fund the implementation of the Summit agreements were estimated at $625 billion a year, which included a transfer of $125 billion from developed to developing countries, failed to emerge. In fact, aid flows declined in the 1990s, which I view as the ‘lost decade’ in retrospect. The 1990s was a time when the world could have truly laid the foundations for a more fair, equitable and sustainable world than we know today.

The 2012 Rio+20 conference, presented as a failure by much of the media, was in fact vital in setting up what would be the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), finally agreed upon in September 2015. Without Rio+20, I am almost certain the agreement would have been closer to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) than what was agreed. The SDGs are different from the MDGs in a number of ways. First, they are universal and apply to all countries, while the MDGs applied to only developing countries. Second, they address the root causes of the problems we face as opposed to just addressing their symptoms. Third, they deal not just with sectors themselves, but also the interlinkages between sectors. For instance, you cannot effectively deal with water issues without recognizing that they are also relevant to issues involving food, energy, health, poverty, gender, biodiversity and climate. Finally, the MDGs address development, while the SDGs address sustainable development.

The SDGs, along with the Paris Agreement in December 2015, provide a very clear blueprint for sustainable development; but, as always, the real world has its own ideas on the implementation of these agreements.

The Brexit decision last year in the United Kingdom and the election of President Trump in the United States are already having an impact. There is no question that the implementation of policies on climate change have slowed in the United Kingdom, while almost stopping altogether in the United States. The difference between now and previous times is that in the area of energy the developments since the financial crisis of 2008 have advanced renewable energy investment. According to the HSBC review of ‘How Green were the Recovery Packages’ had seen large amounts of government funding going to green technology. Roughly 20% of the recovery package in the United States went to green technologies, with similar percentages in France and Germany. In China, this percentage was higher at 37%, and particularly high in South Korea at 79%. This investment means, in many places, renewable energy is now competitive with the fossil fuel industry and is exceeding the fossil fuel industry in job creation.

Around all of the SDGs, there has been an explosion of partnerships (nearly 3000) between governments, the UN, and stakeholders working together to create and deliver results on the ground. Many foundations have reorganized their funding around the SDGs. The SDG Funders Platform provides examples of this reorganization, and today national platforms of foundations exist in places such as Brazil, Ghana, Indonesia, the United States, and the Arab Region. Furthermore, the UN Global Compact, the Global Reporting Initiative, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development have developed the SDG Compass to help companies reorganize and report on their implementation around the SDGs.

While the political climate in two key countries – the United Kingdom and the United States –may have shifted, there is a great deal of evidence to indicate that this shift will be a blip in the implementation of the 2015 SDGs and Paris Climate Agreement. Unlike previous global agreements, industry and the rest of society are integrating these commitments into their work. Leaders in the financial sector such as AVIVA are calling for requiring companies to produce environment, social and governance reports in addition to the traditional financial reports before being listed on the stock exchange. Why are they doing this? Because many of the SDGs are reflected in the top ten global risks in the World Economic Forum’s Annual Risk Report. They represent market failures, and the financial sector must be able to factor them into their investment decisions.

With all of this being said, obviously not everything is going well and there will certainly be countless challenges ahead. Nearly ten years since the financial crisis of 2008, many of the developed world’s economies are still experiencing sluggish growth. History has shown that there are financial crises of different varieties every ten years or so. The issue of banks being ‘too big to fail’ has gotten worse rather than better since 2008, and the Trump Administration in the United States may further exacerbate this issue by eliminating some of the regulations put in place through Dodd-Frank. The next financial crisis is just over the horizon, and I am worry about the resiliency of our political system and its ability to address it. How many of the people who caused the last crisis were ever prosecuted?

We are also in a period of massive change, with emerging technologies that will be greener and more accessible than ever before. Although, this will bring its own problems and governments will need to address them as they develop. The latest technologies, such as driverless cars, advancements in nanotechnology, 3-D printing, and more, will prove to be transformational for our society. So far, governments are not preparing their populations for the impact that these new technologies will have on employment and increasing inequality. These are real changes that, without preparation and government planning, will fuel people’s insecurity and their retreat from globalization as they assume their jobs will be more secure in a world built around higher walls…the higher the better.

In the same way that banks succeeded at privatizing the profits and socializing the losses as they led the global economy to the brink of collapse, my worry going forward is this: are we allowing the same to happen to the environment? Humanity has taken a huge leap over recent decades that has made us more interconnected than ever before – we need to behave as a global civilization as to not face catastrophic consequences.

The implementation of the SDGs and the Climate Agreement are the world’s best and perhaps last hope for creating a just, equitable and sustainable world.

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Alicia Bárcena, executive secretary of ECLAC, and other heads of international agencies discuss the need for greater transparency on the part of governments, during the Open Government Partnership Global Summit in Mexico City. Credit: ECLAC

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Nov 4 2015 (IPS)

Open data policies in Latin America have not yet enabled communities to exercise their right to access to information, consultation and participation with regard to mining or infrastructure projects that affect their surroundings and way of life.

These rights are contained in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration states that “each individual shall have appropriate access to information concerning the environment that is held by public authorities, including information on hazardous materials and activities in their communities, and the opportunity to participate in decision-making processes.

“States shall facilitate and encourage public awareness and participation by making information widely available. Effective access to judicial and administrative proceedings, including redress and remedy, shall be provided.”

“In Latin America, the lack of open, timely information is a widespread problem,” said Tomás Severino, director of the Mexican NGO Cultura Ecológica.

The expert explained to IPS that “information is technical and specialised. Open data gives us the possibility to generate accessible information, to break it down and to disseminate it.”“The problem is severe; it is not enough to just be transparent. There is a question of timing. When do citizens need that information? After the fact? That’s a mistake. We need to think about how to make information available before decisions are reached, as well as information about the impact of those decisions.” -- Carlos Monge

The link between open data and projects that have an influence on local communities and the environment was one of the issues at the Open Government Partnership Global Summit held Oct. 27-29 in Mexico City.

Taking part in the summit were representatives of governments and civil society and academics from the 65 countries participating in the Partnership, created in 2011 under the aegis of the United Nations. Of that total, 15 countries are from Latin America.

During the summit’s forums and workshops, the delegates of organised civil society called for a strengthening of open data policies and faster progress towards compliance with Principle 10, which cannot happen unless there is movement towards total information openness.

It is common practice in the region for communities to be uninformed about the very existence of mining, oil, energy and other kinds of projects even when carried out in their immediate vicinity, as they are neither previously consulted nor given access to information. Permits and concessions are off their radar.

Countries in the region ratified the declaration on the application of Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration, signed during the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012.

According to information shared by participants during the open government summit in Mexico, the question of the environment is limited to instructions to disseminate public consultations in the environmental impact assessment process in the Second Plan of Action on open data 2013-2015.

Currently, Mexico is collecting proposals to design a third, more ambitious, plan.

One of its key focuses is “natural resource governance”, which encompasses climate change, fossil fuels, mining, ecosystems, the right to a healthy environment, and water resources for human consumption.

Representatives of civil society in Latin America discuss the application of open data policies and Principle 10 on access to information, participation and consultation on environmental issues, during one of the panels at the Open Government Partnership Global Summit held Oct. 27-29 in Mexico City. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

For its part, Peru has been discussing since May a “strategy on openness and reuse of open government data” for the period 2015-2019, which would include environmental questions.

In August, Argentina presented the first part of its “second plan for open government 2015–2017”, which also fails to include major environmental considerations.

“The problem is severe; it is not enough to just be transparent,” said Carlos Monge, the representative in Peru of the U.S.-based non-governmental Natural Resource Governance Institute. “There is a question of timing. When do citizens need that information? After the fact?

“That’s a mistake. We need to think about how to make information available before decisions are reached, as well as information about the impact of those decisions,” he told IPS.

Monge complained that since 2014 countries like Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru have reformed their legislation to lower environmental standards, with the aim of drawing investment in the mining and oil industries, due to the drop in global demand for raw materials, one of the pillars of their economies.

The “Global Atlas of Environmental Justice” lists 480 environmental conflicts in 16 Latin American and Caribbean nations, related to activities like mining, fossil fuels, waste and water management, access to land and infrastructure development.

The initiative forms part of the European project “Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade” and is coordinated by the University of Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology and drawn up by experts from 23 universities and environmental justice organisations from 18 countries.

The majority of the disputes, the atlas says, are concentrated in Colombia (101), Brazil (64), Ecuador (50), Peru (38), Argentina (37) and Mexico (36).

When they are in the dark about infrastructure or mining or oil industry projects in their local surroundings, communities suffer what U.S. Professor Rob Nixon calls “slow violence” from environmental problems arising from the exploitation of natural resources, which generates conflicts and further impoverishes local populations.

Alicia Bárcena, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), complained during the summit that local communities are not previously informed about extractive industry projects and said the region is not yet ready to meet open data requirements.

“It’s important for them to have information on concessions, contracts, impacts, revenue, consultations, so they are aware beforehand of the effects,” she told IPS.

The countries of this region agreed in November 2014 on the negotiation of a treaty on Principle 10, in a process facilitated by ECLAC, which is about to open a regional natural resource governance centre.

The second round of negotiations took place Oct. 27-29 in Panama, and the third is to be held in April 2016, in Uruguay.

Severino, who is taking part in Mexico’s open data initiatives and in the Principle 10 regional negotiating process, stressed the need to modify laws to bring them into line with these schemes.

“We need participation and consultation mechanisms,” he said.

Monge cited two processes that he said should be given institutional structures. “Zoning and consultation imply the generation of a lot of information. If they want to carry out a project, the information on money, water and territory should be made transparent,” he said.

The first refers to zoning of residential, industrial or ecological areas, by the municipal authorities, and the second involves asking local populations whether or not they want a project to go ahead.

“Consultation is one of the most effective instruments. Principle 10 addresses it before a project is carried out,” Bárcena said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Aug 8 2012 (IPS)

Humanity is living beyond its means with the growing demand for food, medicines and other nature-based products, making sustainable consumption and conservation a matter of life and death. This is according to the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network, the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

International Union for Conservation of Nature director general Julia Marton-Lefèvre says that a sustainable future cannot be achieved without conserving biological diversity. Courtesy: Laurent Villerent

The IUCN says that despite prioritising attempts to halt the global extinction of plant and animal species, the battle is far from being won.

“We need to do more conservation – which works – and scale it up, and at the same time we need to change our production and consumption habits to make them more sustainable,” IUCN director general Julia Marton-Lefèvre told IPS from Switzerland.

On the eve of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil, in June, the IUCN released its latest update of the Red List of Threatened Species.

The Red List – a global barometer of the health of global biodiversity – indicated that of 63,837 species assessed, 19,817 are threatened with extinction. Freshwater ecosystems are particularly under pressure from the growing human population and exploitation of water resources. In addition, unsustainable fishing practices and the destruction of their habitat through pollution and the building of dams threaten freshwater fish.

According to the IUCN, a quarter of the world’s inland fisheries are on the African continent and 27 percent of freshwater fish in Africa are threatened, including the tilapia (Oreochromis karongae), an important food source in Lake Malawi that has been overfished.

Twenty seven percent of freshwater fish in Africa are threatened, including the tilapia (Oreochromis karongae), an important food source in Lake Malawi that has been overfished. Credit: Claire Ngozo/IPS

Marton-Lefèvre told IPS reporter Busani Bafana, ahead of the IUCN’s World Congress to be held in Jeju, South Korea Sept. 6 to 15, that a sustainable future cannot be achieved without conserving biological diversity.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: In its 2020 Strategic Plan for biodiversity, the IUCN has drawn up a number of targets, and target 12 aims that by 2020 the extinction of known threatened species would have been prevented and their conservation status, particularly of those most in decline, improved and sustained. Are you on target with this strategic plan to halt extinction?

A:  Unfortunately, at the moment the answer is “no”. That is why we have made this target our top priority at IUCN. That is not to say that we haven’t got inspiring examples of conservation success. For example, through our SOS or Save Our Species initiative, IUCN and partners have already helped conserve close to 100 threatened species in over 30 countries. We know that conservation works, but we need significantly greater resources if we are to reverse the current extinction crisis.

Q: In the light of the latest Red List report in June 2012, which shows that a large number of species are threatened with extinction, would you say we have reached a tipping point?

A: Indeed, the latest update of the IUCN Red List paints a bleak picture: one in three corals, one in four mammals and two out of five amphibians are at risk of extinction.

Moreover, a recent ground-breaking study found that we have overshot three out of nine of the so-called “planetary boundaries” that define a “safe operating space” for humanity, including biodiversity loss.

Today we are dangerously close to reaching such “points of no return”, but it is very difficult to predict precisely when a tipping point is reached until it actually happens. For instance, the collapse of the north Atlantic cod fishery happened back in the 1970s but its impacts are felt even today.

Q: What needs to change? Our consumption habits or our conservation efforts?

A: We certainly need both. We need to do more conservation – which works – and scale it up, and at the same time we need to change our production and consumption habits to make them more sustainable.

Consumer demand for nature-based products – for food, medicine, clothing – has emerged as a major threat for many species that had not been affected by habitat loss or climate change thus far. Nature simply cannot keep up with our insatiable appetite for everything from raw materials to live animals – and we need to change that.

Q: Do you think there is now greater political will to halt the extinction of species than, say, 20 years ago?

A: Twenty years ago, at the Rio Earth Summit (United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development), world leaders signed the Convention on Biological Diversity into existence. Today it is one of the most widely ratified global treaties. It is difficult to compare the level of commitment then and now, but one thing is for sure: the political will that is required today is much greater because of the magnitude of the problem.

Q: How has the work of the IUCN and its partners made an impact?

A: For many years, the answer to the central question of the impact of global conservation action has been both anecdotal and elusive. Thanks to the efforts of IUCN, its Species Survival Commission, and our more than 1,200 members around the world, we now have solid evidence that without targeted conservation efforts, the loss of biodiversity as measured by the Red List Index would be almost 20 percent worse.

Q: What challenges remain?

A: The biggest challenge now is getting everyone to understand what is at stake: that nature is not a luxury but the very foundation of our own wellbeing on this planet. We also need to strengthen political will to take the necessary action. As I’ve said before, the situation is quite critical, and our Congress will look at several of these challenges.

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