Issue No. 599
Opinion
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15 - 21 August 2002 Issue No. 599 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Ecological bottlenecks
The survival of Planet Earth has reached a critical threshold and basic restructuring is urgently needed, writes Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio the international community adopted Agenda 21, an unprecedented global plan of action for sustainable development. But implementation of the plan ran up against contentious trade and finance issues and, 10 years on, few, if any, of its recommendations have seen the light of day. That is expected to change when the World Summit on Sustainable Development meets in Johannesburg from 26 August to 4 September. Planned as an "implementation summit", the meeting is expected to bring together tens of thousands of participants in what is being hailed as the largest civil society gathering ever, including heads of state and government, national delegates and leaders from NGOs, business and other major groups. The summit aims at focusing attention on the challenges facing our natural habitat and on the imperative need to conserve natural resources in a world that is growing in population, with increasing demands for food, water, shelter, sanitation, energy, health services and economic security.
The 10th session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (known as CSD10) is acting as the Preparatory Committee for the Johannesburg Summit. It has held four preparatory meetings in 2001 and 2002, the first three in New York and the fourth in Bali, Indonesia. At the Bali meeting last June delegates raced to reach agreement on the final implementation document for the summit. But after exhaustive discussions failed to bring an end to many significant points of disagreement it is clear that special efforts will be needed to make the summit a success. Calling the negotiations a complex, difficult and stressful process, Venezuelan Minister of Environment and Natural Resources Ana Elisa Osario said the developing countries had made significant compromises and concessions but felt there was a lack of reciprocity from their negotiating partners. While admitting that the Bali talks had not met expectations, Spanish Environment Minister Jaume Matas affirmed Europe's commitment to the summit process and said the EU was prepared to table new proposals to break the remaining impasse. Looking on the bright side, US Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky said she welcomed the fact that, although the meeting had been unable to agree on every part of a final text, it "had not tried to paper over differences of opinion".
But these differences will have to be bridged and concerted efforts made to halt, and hopefully reverse, the marked decline in the quality of life on our planet before environmental degradation, pollution and overconsumption damage our ecosystem beyond repair. The challenges facing the summit are staggering. Humanity's use of natural resources has exceeded the regenerative capacity of Earth since the 1980s, and is now 20 per cent above the tolerable level. If governments do not take action to stop this trend, then during the life of our children human welfare will deteriorate critically. This is the conclusion of a recent report put out by the Swiss-based environmental monitoring group WWF International, which will present its findings to the Johannesburg Summit.
The group defines "ecological footprint" as the total area of the planet that humans require for agriculture, grazing land, timber production, marine fishing and infrastructure, together with the area necessary for absorbing the carbon dioxide produced by burning oil, coal and other fossil fuels. At the present rate of consumption, the ecological footprint of all humankind will reach twice the regenerative capacity of Earth by 2050.
This gigantic overconsumption is at the expense of the planet's natural capital: the forests, freshwater ecosystems and oceans. Since 1970, the Living Planet Index, a measure of the health of Earth's ecosystems, has declined by 35 per cent. In the last 30 years freshwater ecosystems have declined by 55 per cent. More than a third of the world's population does not have clean and affordable energy services. The climatic disturbances and the unusual heat wave we have suffered from this summer seem to confirm the theory of global warming.
The Earth has about 11 billion hectares of productive land and sea space, after the unproductive ice caps, desert and open ocean are discounted. Divided between the global population of six billion, this practically means 1.9 hectares per person. But the ecological footprint of the world's average consumer in 1999 was 2.3 hectares per person, that is, 20 per cent above Earth's biological capacity of 1.9 hectares per person.
Because people in different countries have different degrees and models of development, the ecological footprint varies greatly from one country to another. Thus, for the average African and Asian consumer it stands at less than 1.4 hectares per person, for the average Western European at five hectares and for the average North American at 9.6 hectares. According to the report the dangerous downslide in the global quality of life index can only be reversed if four fundamental changes are made. First, we must improve the resource- efficiency with which goods and services are produced; second, we must consume resources more efficiently and redress the disparity in consumption between high and low income countries; third, population growth must be controlled by promoting universal education and health care; and, fourth, we must protect, manage and restore natural ecosystems to conserve biodiversity and ecological services.
The Johannesburg Summit is intended to find ways to generate actions that bring about real improvement in people's lives and in the natural ecosystems that support them. The plan of action under negotiation will be accompanied by a political declaration that will be adopted by world leaders and by partnership initiatives between governments, citizen groups and the private sector to carry out the commitments that governments agree upon. The summit's secretariat will post all partnership proposals received on a Web site to facilitate the exchange of information and the creation of new partnerships.
According to the summit's secretary-general, Nitin Desai, the Bali Preparatory Committee actually achieved a great deal. But negotiations have gone as far as they could have and remaining differences are over difficult issues that require political solutions at a higher level. Desai urged countries to work between Bali and Johannesburg to create the "political space" that is needed in order to resolve what still remains unresolved.
Speaking at the closing session of the Bali preparatory meeting last June, representatives from developing and developed countries vowed to continue to work towards a satisfactory outcome of the summit. All agreed to "strongly reaffirm" their commitment to the Rio principles and the implementation of Agenda 21. Countries also committed themselves to achieving the goals of the United Nations Millennium Summit which include, among others, a commitment to halve the proportion of people living on an income of less than $1 a day by 2015.
The widely reported disagreements between competing factions of African civil society have now been settled and 45 countries have already announced that their leaders will attend the summit. Some 45 others say that it is "likely" that they will attend. More than 100 ministers from around the world took part in the Bali deliberations.
But there are still many areas of disagreement. While most countries have called for the establishment of new targets and timetables for a host of issues, such as implementing proper sanitation, increasing the share of renewable energy, reducing the use of chemicals and restoring fish stocks, other countries maintain that present efforts should be geared rather to meeting the targets and timetables that are presently outstanding. There are also disagreements over the use of the phrase "common but differentiated responsibilities", a term adopted in Rio to delineate the idea that although all countries share the same goals and objectives, they have vastly differing capabilities and resources to achieve them. This issue stands at the heart of the have/have- not divide and raises the very basic question of which of the two parties will have to bear the main brunt of the required changes.
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