A Vision for A Different Kind of Earth Summit

It now looks like we really are going to have another “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro next June.  The Brazilian Government has proposed pushing back the start of the “Rio+20”gathering two weeks to encourage the participation of as many presidents and prime ministers as possible. With this scheduling problem apparently resolved, the international community now has to begin in earnest to figure out what the leaders are actually going to do when they get to Rio on June 2Oth. 

Already more than 600 governments, international agencies, and civil society groups have submitted their views to the UN as to the desired outcomes of the meeting.  In mid-December, the negotiations will start at the UN in New York to hammer out over the next six months what the leaders will be asked to discuss and agree to at the conference.

At the first Earth Summit two decades ago in 1992, more than 100 presidents and prime ministers and other top officials pledged to take action to achieve “sustainable development” with its intertwined goals of economic improvement, social equity, and environmental protection.  They adopted treaties on climate change and biodiversity and Agenda 21 – a 400-page “blueprint” of recommended sustainability measures.   A decade later, world leaders gathered again at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa and adopted another 100-page plan. 

It is generally acknowledged that inspite of some progress, governments have largely failed to fulfill their commitments to sustainability.  My colleague Dan Lashof recently blogged that “the atmosphere doesn’t seem to have noticed the climate convention [adopted in Rio].  In fact, the heating effect of atmospheric pollution has increased by 29 percent since 1990; the year international climate negotiations were initiated. “UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has warned that we are headed towards “disaster” and are running out of time to ensure instead “sustainable climate-resilient green growth.”

So will Rio+20 be any different than previous UN mega-conferences.  At a November 4th UN briefing, Sha Zukang, the Rio+20 Secretary-General, said the primary objective of the gathering would be “to renew political commitment for sustainable development” and that “Rio+20 should be a Conference of implementation."  The rest of his remarks were less reassuring that the UN would not in fact fall back into the same old pattern.  He said “By assessing progress and gaps in existing commitments by addressing new and emerging challenges we can figure out what our next steps should be.”   It sure sounds like the start of yet another long agenda or plan. 

In our submission, NRDC urged the United Nations to learn from past experience and make this meeting different:  “The Summit must do more than just deliver another agenda with lofty goals for the distant future…Instead, Rio+20 should generate real actions on the part of governments at every level, as well as by businesses and civil society groups, to immediately deliver the necessary actions to put us all on a more sustainable path.”

We suggested that the Summit put the spotlight on individual and collective actions of presidents and prime ministers to move toward sustainable development. The Summit should:

• Encourage all presidents and prime ministers to use their allotted time for speeches – usually about 5 minutes - to present on the specific sustainable development initiatives, challenges, and needs in their respective countries.
• Create the expectation for new or substantially scaled-up commitments from all countries, which are specific and short-term; and identify partners for technical assistance and coordinating actions.
• Produce a politically-binding outcomes document of not more than ten pages that recognizes the imminent threat of exceeding our planet’s natural boundaries, the need to move to a new green economy, and recommits governments to act on their promises to move towards sustainable development, and
• Generate an appendix of country commitments to the outcomes document that provides a foundation for a registry of such commitments at a new global center for sustainability actions.

In the days just before the Summit, Governors, Mayors and other regional and local officials, CEOs, and civil society leaders would be asked to make their own specific promises which would feed into the Summit and the proposed global center for sustainability actions. 

NRDC is not alone in calling for real progress next June in Rio.  The U.S. Government recommended in its submission that each participant at Rio+20 present their own “compendium of commitments.”  The UN Secretary General’s new initiative on Secure Energy for All is also seeking concrete pledges by Rio from governments and other stakeholders for efforts on energy poverty, energy efficiency, and renewables.

In our submission to the UN, NRDC outlines some 40 potential “deliverables” from the Earth Summit.  My colleagues Jake Schmidt and Leila Monroe have recently blogged on some of these.  Jake talks about phasing our fossil fuel subsidies and inefficient light bulbs among the measures we recommend to address climate change and energy.  Leila addresses the need to end shark fining and stop marine plastic pollution, which are two of the results we want from the Summit to protect the oceans.

Something that I have learned from many years of advocacy is that change – big or small – is never easy and requires citizens to put real pressure upon our leaders.  As a top Brazilian official said at a recent  Wilson Center event, the engagement of civil society will be critical to the success of Rio+20.   Now is the time to start working to make sure that the Earth Summit next June will be the moment when the world stopped talking and started acting to move us towards a more promising, sustainable future.

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