Næste uges store topmøde i Rio om det globale miljø ender næppe i de store bindende aftaler, snarere i hensigtserklæringer om at komme igang med den verdensomspændende kamp for miljøet for alvor.
RIO DE JANEIRO, 14 June 2012 (IRIN): “The pace is too slow” and “there is a lack of urgency”, grumbled a negotiator as preparatory talks on the final political outcome document limped (haltede) back into motion on 13 June at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, also known Rio+20, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
“We have just a week to go before the conference starts officially on 20 June,” said Sha Zukang, UN under-secretary-general for economic and social affairs, and secretary-general of Rio+20.
Officials, NGOs and members of other lobby groups have three days in which to work out their differences before heads of state make a final decision on accepting the document.
Before the last round of talks in New York, in the first week of June 2012, only 6 percent of the text had been agreed upon.
This has now jumped to more than 20 percent and many additional paragraphs are close to agreement, according to Ambassador Kim Sook of the Republic of Korea (Sydkorea), co-chair of the Preparatory Committee.
But with less than a week to go, there are still disagreements over the parameters of the main issues on the Rio+20 agenda – the green economy, the institutional framework for sustainable development (IFSD), and the more recently introduced sustainable development goals (SDGs).
Senior officials have been talking about “concrete decisions” and the need to come up with a “binding agreement”.
Voluntary commitments
Sha Zukang indicated that Rio’s outcome would be about voluntary commitments that countries are willing to make to set themselves on a sustainable development path.
Tara Rao, the lead author of a paper on a Southern perspective of a green economy for the Danish 92 Group, an association of 22 Danish NGOs, noted:
“The day countries’ finance ministers and heads of state participate in these talks… would be an indication that they are serious about commitments. At the moment sustainable development is still seen as an environmental issue, and countries are represented by their environment or foreign affairs ministers.”
Sustainable development – a term coined by the UN some 20 years ago – means that countries should achieve development and economic growth without compromising the environment or the wellbeing of their people.
But on the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Summit, officials at the conference say Rio+20 should be seen as “the beginning of the process to draft a sustainable development pathway for countries”.
Besides, Sha Zukang pointed out, many issues (such as technology transfer from the developed to the developing world to enable them to become greener) have remained stuck in the UN climate change talks, the last round of which was held in Durban, South Africa, in 2011.
Until those were resolved it would be difficult for countries to move forward.
“Rio+20 is more about aspirations and not actions, as such,” said Saleemul Huq, a climate change scientist at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a UK-based policy think-tank.
IRIN spoke to NGOs and think-tanks about their sense of unresolved issues, and asked them to list three things that they hoped the world could draw from Rio+20.
The sticky issues
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