High hopes dashed at Summit

In the growing avalanche of global meetings about the environment, Earth Summit II is already a dim memory. This special session of the UN General Assembly was held in New York in June 1997. It was a review of progress made on global environment and development in the five years since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. What progress, you ask? Well, precious little, as the authors of this assiduous scrape through the ashes agree. And, if anything, the meeting did more harm than good. It showed that politicians could show up at a major environmental conference, promise nothing and survive unscathed.

Though hardly a campaigning inspiration, this is an authoritative book. Derek Osborn chaired many of the preparatory meetings for the conference. He is also chairman of the European Environment Agency and a former senior British civil servant. He and Tom Bigg, a leading British environmental activist, patiently chart the run-up to the summit and provide a detailed commentary on the documents agreed there.

The betrayal was well in hand before Earth Summit II. It is worth remembering again the high hopes at Rio five years before. That was a conference about development as well as the environment. The conference organiser Maurice Strong declared that $125 billion in "green" development aid was needed each year to turn the planet towards a path of "sustainable development". As a first instalment he called on nations in Rio to pledge $10 billion there and then. As the first summit closed, he reckoned he had got $2 billion. But even that evaporated within days.

As Osborn and Bigg observe: "The countries of the North agreed (in Rio) to make new and additional resources available to the South to enable them to handle their development in a more sustainable and environmentally friendly way. But with some honourable exceptions, the North has not delivered on this promise and the total of official aid has shrunk by 20 per cent." In effect, the compact between environment and economic development in the poor world, hammered out so laboriously in Rio, collapsed.

Nobody in New York was about to put it back together again. The only good thing about Earth Summit II was that nobody wanted to dismantle the intellectual basis of the green agenda drawn up in Rio. The strictures of the vast and all-embracing Agenda 21, the main document agreed in Rio, were not questioned. Nobody doubted the need to clean up the environment - and many rich nations can claim to be making progress in their own backyards, albeit often by exporting the dirtiest activities to poorer nations far away.

Nor did anybody doubt that future economic development on our planet had to be tempered and directed by concern for the environment. Or that failure would eventually undermine economic development itself as pollution worsened and natural resources ran out. And nobody doubted that those countries lucky enough to have gained a head-start in economic development had a duty to help those trying to make the same journey in more constrained planetary times.

It was just that nobody got round to doing much about making this happen. For all the tough words in New York, on poverty in particular, the decline in foreign aid is likely to persist. As the authors note: "Nothing done at the Special Session gives any prospect of this being reversed in the near future."

Some say government aid no longer matters. The free-market mantra of the mid-1990s holds that private investment is taking the place of intergovernmental aid. The authors have little time for this. Such investment, they point out, "is largely concentrated in certain areas of a minority of countries, and cannot easily be spread more widely to help poverty relief and sustainable development". Trickle down? Forget it.

And even the continued existence of that investment has become doubtful. As investors draw in their horns in the face of economic collapse in Asia, Russia and Latin America, the prospects for the environment as well as development become more bleak.

Osborn and Bigg's disappointment goes beyond political realities, however. They argue that even where progress might have been made in New York, things fell flat. They blame much of this on poor preparation for the session. A European push to revive the idea of a convention on forests failed to make progress again. The "looming catastrophe of over-fishing, which is driving many species to the brink of extinction" was acknowledged in New York, but without nations being offered a blueprint for action.

Developing nations, particularly from Africa, went to New York hoping to get firm commitments from rich countries to help implement the UN Desertification Convention. This convention, initiated at the Earth Summit, came into force in 1997. But, Osborn observes, "it was a pity that the North proved unable to bring forward any positive proposals in time to respond to this plea."

Maybe the fires can be stoked again in time for the next Earth Summit, promised for 2002. Perhaps the new and tougher tsars of the UN agencies - such as Klaus Topfer at the UN Environment Programme and James Gustav Speth at Development - can conjure an Earth Summit in 2002 that revives the spirit of 1992. Maybe not.

But optimists can at least fill their diaries. Poverty and aid will be addressed again at a five-year review of the 1995 World Summit on social development. There is even a plan for a Millennial UN General Assembly in 2000, when the UN's objectives could be reviewed. Osborn also sees hope in the "orderly sequence of work" being done by the UN's Commission on Sustainable Development, whose job it is to put the Agenda 21 into practice. But, as he admits, what is lacking is public mobilisation and political pressure.

But that is not inevitable. We saw such pressures at work just six months after Earth Summit II, when many of the same personnel showed up in Japan to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol and set a cap on emissions of greenhouse gases by the industrialised nations. One of the keys to the progress of tackling climate change has been the quality of the science that sustains the case for action. This November the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has forged a broad scientific consensus on the likely impacts of global warming, is ten years old.

In Climate: Impact and Adaptation Assessment, two leading British climate researchers involved in the IPCC process lay out in some detail the methodology that lies behind future projections about, say, the impact on millet yields in southern Africa or the cost of saving small island states from rising sea levels. Crucially, they show how they try to assess the ability of communities to adapt to climate change, and how they use their models to assess the vulnerability of societies to change.

It is, in effect, a manual for best practice for the increasing number of natural and social scientists who find themselves drawn towards the climate change debate. But it is also a readable text for anyone perplexed about where some of the predictions for a world a hundred years away come from.

Fred Pearce has reported on environmental politics for the past decade.