R. RAMACHANDRAN
THE best definition of the phrase 'sustainable development' perhaps is the one arrived at by the Brundtland Commision set up by the United Nations in 1987 as "development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." In 1992, the U.N. Conference on Environment and Develoment (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, the Earth Summit, called for sustainable development "to ensure socially responsible economic development while protecting the resource base and the environment for the benefit of future generations". Ten years down the line, as the 21st century confronts the world, it is time to take stock of progress in achieving that goal. The U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), scheduled to take place in Johannesburg between August 26 and September 4, is aimed to do that as well as to evolve workable solutions to move ahead.
What had been initiated at the 1972 Stockholm U.N. Conference on the Human Environment culminated in Rio with the global realisation that environmental protection and natural resource management must be integrated with socio-economic issues. The Rio Summit was a landmark event that brought together governments including more than 100 heads of state, international agencies and non-governmental organisations(NGOs), where the international community committed itself to secure economic well-being, social development and environmental stabilty - the three pillars that the world had come to realise need to be concurrently addressed if sustainable development is to be achieved. Ignoring any one of these, negates the achievements with regard to the other two.
The future agenda for sustainable development was clearly defined at the conclusion of the Rio Summit when the assembled leaders signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD); endorsed the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development and the Forest Principles; and adopted Agenda 21, a 300-page plan for achieving sustainable development in the 21st century. Agenda-21 constitutes the centrepiece of the Rio Summit.
As a follow-up, the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) was created in December 1992 under the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in order to ensure the effective implementation - at the local, national, regional and international levels - of what had been agreed upon at UNCED. The five-year review of the progress of the Earth Summit by a special session of the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) - called Earth Summit + 5 - held in June 1997 adopted a comprehensive document titled 'Programme for the Further Implementation of Agenda 21' prepared by the CSD. It also adopted the programme of work of the Commission for 1998-2002.
Year 2002, or Rio + 10, is upon us and Agenda 21 is up for its second five-year review. The WSSD, being held under the auspices of the CSD, will be the forum where progress on Agenda-21 will be reviewed and decisions taken with regard to its implementation in the 21st century. WSSD will also evolve measures to implement the developmental goals of the Millennium Declaration adopted at the Millennium Summit held in New York in September 2000, which included the following resolve of the world leaders: "We reaffirm our support for the principles of sustainable development, including those set out in Agenda 21, agreed upon at the UNCED." These Millennium Development Goals (MDG) supplement the objectives set forth in Agenda 21.
Such a reiteration of the Rio objectives has become necessary as, despite the global consensus and political commitment of nation-states to a future of sustainable development, progress towards the established goals has been tardy and in some respects the conditions are worse than they were a decade ago. Indeed, in one of the Millennium Summit preparatory sessions of the General Assembly, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed surprise at the limited discussions on the subject of sustainable development and remarked that "so little priority is accorded to these extraordinarily serious challenges for all humankind". This reaffirmation notwithstanding, the U.S. rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change was a significant pointer to the growing concern that the developed countries are yet to demonstrate their full commitment to end their unsustainable ways of living.
In his comprehensive report "Implementing Agenda-21" presented at the conclusion of the Second meeting of the Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) for the WSSD held in New York between January 28 and February 8, Kofi Annan identified four broad areas where "gaps in implemention were particularly visible":
* A fragmented approach towards sustainable development: Policies and programmes at both national and international levels do not reflect the inextricable connections between economic, social and environmental objectives;
* No discernible changes in the unsustainable consumption and production patterns, which are putting the natural life-support system at peril;
* Lack of mutually coherent policies or approaches in the areas of finance, trade, investment, technology and sustainable development, particularly in the context of a globalising world;
* The financial resources required for implementing Agenda-21 have not been forthcoming and mechanisms for transfer of technology have not improved.
In the run-up to the Johannesburg Summit, besides the PrepComs of the CSD (of which two more will be held in March-April and May-June), several national, regional and international conferences are being held to identify the issues that will go to supplement the official WSSD agenda arrived at by the CSD. One such important international meeting was the one organised in New Delhi between February 8 and 11 by the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI), a research-oriented non-governmental organisation with its headquarters in New Delhi. Called the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit 2002 (DSDS 2002) (the second in TERI's sustainable development summit series), the conference was titled: "Ensuring Sustainable Livelihoods: challenges for governments, corporates and civil society at Rio + 10".
THE meeting brought together eminent personalities from India and abroad concerned with issues related to sustainable development, most notably Jan Pronk, the Special Envoy appointed by Kofi Annan to the WSSD. Pronk, currently the Dutch Minister for Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment, is also the Chairman of the Seventh Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Kyoto Protocol scheduled for November 2002 and the prime force behind the Protocol's final text and its adoption. It is learnt that one of the prime objectives of Pronk's visit to India was to extend a personal invitation to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to attend the Johannesburg Summit. "If the Summit is to be called a Summit, heads of state and heads of governments must make every effort to participate and for the summitto be a global summit, no country should be absent so that a globally agreeable agenda must be negotiated," Pronk remarked in his statement read out at the inaugural of the conference as commitments back home prevented him from reaching the meet in time.
Pronk wished to emphasise the fact that, though Johannesburg is the follow-up to Rio, it is not a conference on environment, but on sustainable development, including economics, social affairs and the environment. "Too few people realise that even today," he said. "In Johannesburg, apart from focussing on what went well and what went wrong, we will have to decide on those aspects of Rio that have been forgotten and simultaneously there is a need to look forward. There are trends that were not prominent ten years ago that need to be included today - the impact of globalisation, new technologies in biotechnology and information and communication, new violence such as new types of wars and terrorism," he added. "Rather than issuing a list of recommendations Johannesburg must reach concrete decisions," Pronk stressed.
Pronk emphasised the fact that the question of access to technology needed to be addressed more pointedly. In fact, at the press briefing, Pronk lamented the fact that this aspect did not receive sufficient attention even at the Delhi Summit. "In the past, we paid lip service to this promise, but the finance was always lacking. We need agreement on finance for technology access as well as agreements on more lenient regulations in order to facilitate access to poor countries," Pronk observed.
The summit background report circulated by TERI reflected the fact that, in the lead-up to the WSSD, the U.N. and other international development agencies shifted their focus to targeting poverty alleviation as the overriding concern to achieve sustainable development. The path followed until now by governments and international institutions, giving priority to economic growth, has given way to a realisation that this does not necessarily bring about sustainable development, the alleviation of poverty in particular. Every PrepCom meeting has voiced the concern that the core developmental issues of eradicating poverty and meeting basic human needs remain the prime challenge in the developing countries and unless the needs of the weakest are put first, all efforts to preserve the environment or promote sustainable development would prove self-defeating.
The TERI background report quoted the observation by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED): "A world in which poverty and inequity are endemic will always be prone to ecological and other crises." According to it, 20 per cent of global population, living in high-income countries, accounted for as much as 86 per cent of the total private consumption expenditure, and the share of the poorest 20 per cent was only 1.3 per cent. The report said that there was a decline in overall poverty rate in the developing countries, from 29 per cent in 1990 to 23 per cent in 1998 (based on poverty line of $1 per day) and the absolute number of poor declined from 1.3 billion to 1.2 billion. While much of this improvement was concentrated in East and Southeast Asia, with some progress in South Asia and Latin America, there was no progress in sub-Saharan Africa where almost half the population lived in poverty.
"Poverty alleviation measures," the report said, "have traditionally focussed on enhancing per capita income and consumption at the national level, as also manipulating sectoral policies to direct subsidies to the poor. These approaches did not pay adequate heed to the mileu, within which the poor exist and resources they use for generating a livelihood. Poverty eradication in the long run requires the poor to sustain enhanced standards of living through promotion of opportunity, empowerment and security, which in essence lays the foundation of the sustainable livelihood approach. Sustainable livelihood opportunities are shaped not only by local or endogenous factors but also seemingly exogenous factors such as ecnomic and social integration of the nations of the world." The report called for reinvigorating the promises made at Rio regarding resources, technology, capacity-building and market access.
CRITICISING the developed world for not fulfilling the "lesser obligation" of just one-third of the financial resources required to implement Agenda-21, Prime Minister Vajpayee in his inaugural address said: "Clearly, they must give more resources, directly through higher aid and indirectly by opening their markets to poorer nations. Therefore, imposing environmental or labour restrictions on free movement of goods and services, in the name of selective aspects of sustainable development... will only intensify poverty in the developing world."
Vajpayee made some proposals for raising resources by using the instruments of sustainable development and globalisation innovatively. He proposed special multilateral levies on global natural resources used by rich countries such as the electromagnetic spectrum or marine fisheries. He also suggested a levy on capital transactions across industrialised countries and capital repatriations from developing countries for several specific poverty alleviation initiatives. "We need to make both sustainable development and globalisation work for the poor... We cannot make the poor and the deprived wait any longer in their aspiration to live a better life. This is the first and foremost task in sustainable development," the Prime Minister added. He urged the summit to present the issues on the agenda for Johannesburg in as clear and unambiguous terms as possible.
The summit was to result in a 'Delhi Declaration' and a report on the conference was to be presented to the CSD for considertaion at Johannesburg. For some unstated reason, the much-touted declaration has not been issued yet and the report is yet to be finalised.
The summit's deliberations were organised into 10 thematic sessions. For the poor, the session on ensuring sustainable livelihoods observed, globalisation was both an opportunity and a threat. On the upside, globalisation could make economic activities and institutions more efficient, develop human capital, enhance employment opportunities, provide access to cleaner and more efficient technologies, promote environmental awareness and create market self-regulation of industrial activities. On the down side, the exacerbation of inequities in the distribution of benefits among world's population had been an impediment to sustainable livelihoods.
The session also expressed concern on the rapid changes in lifestyles and cultural upheaval that it has led to in developing countries. The developed countries, on the other hand, had selectively tapped trained human resources from the developing countries, noticeably in the fields of health, education and information technology, often resulting in exploitation of assets with no returns to the source countries. While Agenda-21 had underscored the importance of such issues, and they had been reiterated at various forums, they were yet to find effective expression in national strategies for development or in bilateral and multilateral commitments.
Rio had held out the promise of 'new and additional' financial resources for sustainable development; to the tune of $600 billion to implement Agenda 21. On the contrary, the session on financing noted, Official Development Assistance (ODA) flows had declined significantly over the past 10 years. Domestic and foreign private capital had proved inadequate in engendering sustainable development. Further, domestic action towards correcting market and policy failures and making more efficient use of available resources left much to be desired.
The meeting called for not only an increase in the quantum of financial resources - ODA, FDI and domestic - but also more effective use of available resources. It also called for major increases in the funding levels for the Global Environmental Facility (GEF). The session observed that financing a larger number of smaller projects may be more successful than a few large projects in using available resources to ameliorate poverty. The International Conference on Financing and Development to be held in March in Monterrey, Mexico, is expected to discuss ways and means to promote coherence and consistency in the global financing system.
The session underscored the need to restructure financial services to serve the poor better. Citing the example of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, it said that monetary systems needed to design special instruments to attract microsavings of the poor into the corporate sector, particularly where these can be structured to serve the poor. The session noted that the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) introduced under the Kyoto Protocol offered opportunities to tap private capital for sustainable development activities while at the same time providing access to technology to developing countries and enabling industrialised countries to meet their commitments to reduce green house gas emissions flexibly and effectively.
"Since everyone is a potential stakeholder, the Johannesburg Summit will need to strengthen the mechanism for involving all stakeholders, especially the vulnerable groups, in decision making. At the discussion on 'engaging stakeholders', it was observed that the business community should be recognised as an important stakeholder in the pursuit of sustainable development.
The Delhi Summit has come out with a list of recommendations that will presumably form part of the report to be submitted to the WSSD. If there is one common threat that runs through the rich fabric of the proceedings, it is the resolve to go beyond deliberations and focus on determined action.