Climbing a steep Summit.

• Author: Flavin, Christopher
• Position: Essay - World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg - Brief Article

In June I traveled to Rio de Janeiro for an event marking the 10th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit. Hosted by Brazil's President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, "Rio Plus Ten" included meetings on climate change and biological diversity and a "passing of the torch" to President Mbeki of South Africa, who is hosting this year's World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.

Despite two days of bold declarations and stimulating discussions, the spirit of the meetings was hardly upbeat. The enthusiasm that marked the 1992 Earth Summit now seems a distant memory, as deep divides have marked the preparations for Johannesburg. The current U.S. government has maintained unbending opposition to virtually all international agreements and institutions, and the whole notion of global progress now seems up for grabs.

This World Summit comes at a difficult, indeed dangerous, time. Any honest assessment of the 10 years since Rio must conclude, as Worldwatch did in State of the World 2002, that the world has made little progress in addressing the major problems the Rio Summit was intended to tackle. At the Earth Summit, leaders from around the world officially recognized--in two historic treaties on climate change and biological diversity--the profound ways in which human development has gone out of balance with natural systems.

While it was ambitious to expect that profound environmental trends--massive deforestation, biodiversity loss, rapid population growth, to name a few--would be turned around in a single decade, even first steps have proved painful and inadequate. It has taken 10 years, for example, for the world to come close to ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, with its legally binding limits on greenhouse gases. And the number one carbon emitter, the United States, remains on the sidelines. (See "Kyoto protocol close to entering into force," page 10.) The promise of the Convention on Biological Diversity remains largely unfulfilled, and huge swaths of Agenda 21 have been ignored--including government commitments to increase foreign aid to developing countries, which has in fact declined substantially over the last decade.

The underlying conflicts that have prevented progress on these vital global problems were on full display this spring at the final preparatory meeting for the World Summit in Bali. Many nations seemed far more committed to protecting the favors and subsidies available to concentrated economic interests, in agriculture or...