bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1993) — Winter 1993 // Hiver 1993, pp. 20–23
by John Bell In the closing speech of the Earth Summit,
Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the LUN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), captured the mood of the packed plenary hall when he said that international diplomacy would never be the same again; that the relationship between environment and development would never be the same again; and that perceptions of the need for financial flows for developing countries have been altered for good
This Earth Summit (as UNCED came to be called) had brought together 120 Heads of State and Government, and official delegations from 178 countries, to reach agreement on common approaches to undertake the transition to a more sustainable and just future through the twenty-seven principles of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development; through Agenda 21, the massive blueprint to translate the concept of sustainable development into workable programs and policies; a Statement of Forest Principles; and in two global conventions — one on Biological Diversity, and one on Climate Change.
As the first major international conference convened after the collapse of communism, UNCED accelerated the process of shifting approaches from “military global security” on an East-West axis to one of “environmental security” on a North-South axis. It sought to make common concern for our planet’s life support systems the basis for a new relationship between North and South, leading to the incorporation of environmental issues into an accelerated development process. This UNCED process was greatly enriched by the active participation of sectors outside government, particularly non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from around the world. They included business, environmental and development NGOs, women’s groups, youth and indigenous peoples. They participated both on official government delegations and by direct accreditation to the conference and numbered in the hundreds of NGOs deemed to have “relevance and competence” to UNCED. Their active inclusion set a new standard for participation at international negotiations.
The separate NGO parallel conference, Global Forum, was held at Flamingo Park in the heart of Rio de Janeiro. It brought together an amazing cross-section of groups from around the world to an event at which NGOs themselves negotiated “alternate treaties” on Environment and Development. There were also important meetings of indigenous peoples, business executives, and spiritual leaders. The eventual followup of all these groups and organizations will continue to have impact around the world as they seek to implement their own vision of Agenda 21.
The vast media contingent at Rio (close to 6,000 individuals alone, or about twice as many as at any other major international meeting), ensured that millions of people around the world were exposed to the critical issues discussed at Rio. Maclean’s, Time, Newsweek, Life, Le Point, and countless other magazines wrote cover stories on the Earth Summit, and CNN had almost continuous coverage of Rio. As the Earth Summit Bulletin noted in its summary of the Earth Summit, “When President Collor of Brazil officially concluded UNCED, the hundreds of diplomats, NGOs, support staff and [UN] Secretariat members who had worked together from Nairobi, through Geneva, and New York, to Rio de Janeiro, had not only contributed to one of the most significant international negotiation processes, but had individually participated in the creation of an elaborate programming tool that could set the planet on a new course towards sustainable Still later in Vancouver, Maurice Strong pointed out in his speech at the 1992 annual O.D. Skelton Lecture, “The Earth Summit was neither the beginning nor the end of a process by which the World Community [has] to confront the threats to its own future arising from the same processes of technology-driven change that have produced our industrial civilization”.. The seeds of public concern for the environment planted during the industrial revolution grew into heightened public concern in the 1960s when Rachel Carson warned in her book, Silent Spring, that we were causing irreparable harm to the environment through excessive use of chemicals. The Club of Rome agreed that there were indeed “limits to growth”
All these factors resulted in a universal call for convening a UN Conference in 1972 on the “Human Environment” that took place in Stockholm. After Maurice Strong, the then-President of CIDA, was appointed Secretary General of the Stockholm Conference, he gathered together a few policy experts at MIT to reflect on what the conference should try to achieve. They concluded that effective change would require incorporating environmental considerations into economic decision-making and linking environment and development.
Developing countries, however, feared the Stockholm Conference would lead to new forms of “conditionality” based on pollution control that would slow down their development without any compensating financial relief, and that they would face new “green protectionism” in the industrialized markets of the North. They became less reluctant after Maurice Strong organized a meeting of economists in Switzerland who, in their “Fournex Declaration”, advocated that environment and development should be mutually reinforcing concepts, and that developed countries should open their markets to facilitate developing countries in obtaining the financial resources needed for their environmental protection.
In spite of the Fournex Declaration and Mrs. Gandhi’s eloquent statement at Stockholm that “poverty is the single greatest cause of environmental degradation in the Third World”,, the legacy of Stockholm essentially was limited to the environment. Stockholm had put environmental issues on the world’s political agenda. This factor led to the creation in 1972 of the United Nations Environmental Agency (UNEP) in Nairobi (with Maurice Strong as its first Executive Director). It also led to the establishment of departments of environment (as in Canada) or environmental protection agencies in many countries of the world.
When countries met a decade later in 1982 (in Nairobi under the auspices of UNEP) to assess the results of Stockholm, the risk to the planet’s life support systems had become more not less acute. The need for further action was clear and led to the creation of the UN World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) headed by Gro Harlem Brundtland, the then-Prime Minister of Norway. The commission’s report “Our Common Future” was released in 1987 and articulated the concept of “sustainable development”. It too called for a major UN conference to begin putting these concepts into practice.
The Brundtland Commission saw the problem as one of “an essentially open human economic system that [is] pushing against an essentially closed ecological system”. It concluded that the solution lay in integrating environmental considerations into economic decision-making at the highest level before decisions are taken. This would then allow for the multiple increases in food and energy needed to provide a better standard of living for the 1.5 billion people living in absolute. poverty today and in anticipation of the likely doubling of the world’s population by the middle of the next century. The Brundtland approach calls for increased equity and continued growth.
After bleary-eyed diplomats in New York left an all-night negotiating session of the mandate for UNCED, many of them were left with the impression that preparations were being made for two conferences — one on environment and one on development — rather than one which integrated environment and development. Following Maurice Strong’s appointment once again as Secretary General of UNCED, and Ambassador Tommy Koh of Singapore as Chairperson of the Preparatory Committee, a UNCED process was launched that involved countries, organizations and individuals around the world in an intense two and a half years of preparations for the Earth Summit in Rio. This included four monthlong Preparatory Committee meetings (PrepComs) in Nairobi, Geneva, and twice in New York, to negotiate texts for approval at Rio; UN Conferences in the main geographical regions, and on key sectoral issues such as “Fresh Water” in Dublin, and “Sustainable Agriculture” in the Netherlands; meetings of Environment and Development Ministers from developing countries in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur, and from OECD countries in Paris; and meetings of major groups including women in Miami, and business and industry in Wickham, Netherlands. All produced carefully negotiated “Declarations” on the issues under negotiation. There were also hundreds of workshops and seminars on UNCED issues held around the world.
This “mega negotiation” had several interesting characteristics. Certain people felt the Rio Conference should concentrate on global environmental issues. However, it soon became apparent that in creating a framework to facilitate transition to sustainable development, a truly comprehensive approach would be necessary. This led to negotiation of “Agenda 21”; a forty-chapter, five-hundred page document that was agreed to in principle by world leaders. Although it is not legally binding, it is to be implemented at the national level by governments and organizations according to their priorities.
Agenda 21 consists of a preamble and chapters covering four broad categories: economic and social dimensions; sustainable use of resources for development; strengthening the role of major groups; and the means of implementation. Agreements were reached on the basis of consensus. This meant that any one delegation alone could, and sometimes did, hold up the progress made by the other 177 countries. This led to results which critics felt were the “lowest common denominator” ’. However, as negotiations were leading to agreement on an overall package, participants had to be prepared to have flexibility on certain areas in return for gaining in others. Thanks to the unique talents of the chairperson, Ambassador Tommy Koh, countless compromises were eventually facilitated and deals were made to achieve overall agreement in Rio.
In such an atmosphere, there were innumerable tensions of which none were as great as those between North and South. To put it simply, many in the North saw UNCED as a conference specifically about the environment and particularly about the global issues of climate change, biological diversity and ozone depletion. Accordingly, they felt the principal outcome should be a mechanism to help poor countries, namely, the “Global Environment Facility” (GEF) that by 1992 was already a US $1.5 billion pilot project funded under the World Bank, UNEP and UNDP.
GEF’s raison-d’être would be to fund projects of “global significance” and especially to finance the incremental costs incurred to obtain global benefits from development projects. Because benefits would accrue to all countries, the GEF was seen not as a form of official development assistance or aid, but rather as a new form of global “cooperation”
The priorities of the South, on the other hand, related to the alleviation of the poverty that, twenty years earlier, Mrs. Gandhi had said was the principle cause for environmental degradation in the Third World. According to countries of the South, treating today’s hunger should come ahead of worrying about tomorrow’s climate change. They viewed environmental problems as being “local” rather than global and called for creation of a new “Green Fund” to help them implement Agenda 21. The South Commission pointed out that industrialized countries, with only 25 per cent of the world’s population, caused the vast amount of pollution, such as 80 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. They stressed that poor countries need “environmental space” to help lift them out of their poverty.
The funding question was undoubtedly the toughest one at Rio. The UNCED Secretariat had estimated the cost of implementing Agenda 21 to be US $600 billion each year. The greatest portion would be generated within individual countries, although US $125 billion a year was to be raised through contributions from the international community for developing countries. This would result in US $70 billion dollars in “new and additional” resources over and above the current ODA level of some US $55 billion per year. (Coincidentally, this would raise ODA to the agreed UN target of 0.7 per cent of GNP.)
In the end, developing countries agreed that the GEF would be the principal mechanism for funding global issues (especially the Conventions on Biodiversity and Climate Change). This was in return for consideration of an “Earth increment” for IDA (the soft window of the World Bank) to support funding of Agenda 21 activities and reaffirmation as soon as possible by developed countries of their intent to meet the 0.7 per cent target for ODA. (The USA and Switzerland, having never committed themselves to this target, will be exempt.) There was also acknowledgement of the need for debt relief, greater flows of direct foreign private investment, and open markets.
Tensions also ran high among developing countries worried about competition with countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) for scarce funds, particularly since the FSU sought recognition of their special plight of being “economies in transition”. The FSU went further and emphasized its need for support from the international community to redress the horrendous environmental inheritance from communism. These tensions were partially resolved by including a special reference to “economies in transition” in the preamble to Agenda 21.
At the outset, Africans felt excluded at the expense of large developing countries such as China, India and Brazil with their huge environmental endowments. Over time, they skilfully obtained agreement on “desertification” as an issue of both regional and global significance. The UNCED Conference agreed, therefore, to the negotiation by 1994 of a Global Convention on Desertification.
The coalition of small island states successfully argued for an international conference on their special situation in 1993. Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing states then advocated that nuclear energy come under the same scrutiny as fossil fuels. They insisted that technology for sustainable development must be both “safe and sound”. They only withdrew their overall reservations on the Agenda 21 atmosphere chapter at the eleventh hour of the last negotiating session in Rio.
Was UNCED a success? Jim MacNeill, the Canadian Secretary of the Brundtland Commission, had suggested that a “dramatic failure” would be preferable to a “fake success”, devoid of real commitment, and which was little more than a photo opportunity for world leaders. Now that seven months have elapsed, my opinion is that Rio was a success, albeit a qualified one. World leaders (even President Bush) in the final analysis did attend expecting to make Rio truly an “Earth Summit”.. The predicted breakdown in negotiations between North, South, and East did not happen.
Canada achieved several important national goals. We also contributed substantively to the conference outcome in a variety of ways, especially by helping to build bridges between North and South in key negotiations on issues such as funding, forest principles, and climate change. Prime Minister Mulroney had earlier set the tone in his June 1st speech at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. He outlined an action agenda for Rio and signalled Canada’s intent to sign, ratify, and implement the Conventions promptly. This was at a time when the United States was still indicating it would probably not sign the “Biodiversity Convention” and before any other G-7 country, except Germany, had indicated its likely position. This speech made Canada a leader on the issue, and put us on the moral “high ground” by the time the Canada Delegation arrived in Rio a few days later.
Two years’ of intensive lobbying by Canada and negotiations to change the way nations think about high seas fisheries (ie. from a purely “economic” resource to one of “conservation and sustainable use” of an ecosystem) was rewarded when the EC withdrew its objections and the Conference agreed that there be a major UN Conference on “straddling stocks and highly migratory species”. Agreement on a “Statement of Forests Principles” did fall short of the global convention which Canada had earlier hoped for, but it is nevertheless an important step in international cooperation on forests.
Canada’s priorities related to forests and fishing, affectionately referred to as our “fish and chips” approach, reflected our geography which comprises 10 per cent of the world’s forests and the world’s longest coastline. These reinforced our desire to contribute concretely to achieving solutions on related key issues such as funding, technology transfer, and poverty and to encourage the widest possible participation in our national preparations for UNCED.
The creation of the “Canadian Participatory Committee for UNCED (CPCU)” as an indigenous and women’s groups, and the International Chamber of Commerce for business, greatly facilitated NGOs’ participation throughout the UNCED process. The fact that the official Canadian delegation included representatives from all these groups made a major difference on how and what we negotiated.
Another factor in the success of Rio was because the Brazilian government, working with the UN, provided excellent conference facilities and logistical backup. Many delegations who frequent UN conferences internationally felt that the “Rio Centro Conferência” complex was in some ways better than UN Conference sites in New York or Geneva. Furthermore, by having the conference in Rio de Janeiro, a developing country megapolis, the stark realities of favelas, abandoned children, and the challenges of industrial waste and city sewage, all served to bring the environment-development nexus into sharper focus for all who attended the Summit with their eyes open.
While few delegations left Rio totally satisfied with the outcome, they did take back a far better appreciation of the interconnectedness of the environment and development. This notwithstanding, many observers were disappointed with the weak commitments made by governments in “watered-down” texts. The original idea of agreeing on a short, visionary “Earth Charter” which focused on integrating environment into an accelerated development process, had given way to the 27 principles of the “Rio Declaration on Environment and Development”. While both poor countries’ concerns about development and industrialized countries’ priorities on environment were respected, they were not fully integrated in the Declaration. This led one head of delegation to suggest it reads like a “municipal by-law”. Nonetheless, it is a milestone as this is the first time many of the principles have been agreed to by the world community at the highest levels.
Concerns that Agenda 21 (the 500-page, 40-chapter, program of action for the rest of this century and beyond) did not properly address the central issues of population, consumption and military spending are only partially justified. In the end, as Gus Speth of the World Resources Institute wrote recently: “The greatest accomplishment of the Earth Summit may lie not in the actual commitments governments made, which were mostly modest, but on the way that the event has shaped the international agenda for years to come. It defined the new international values of equity and the environment, and linked them inseparably, and dramatized how powerfully they affect North-South relations.”
Canada’s post-Rio agenda is already off to a good start. First, a meeting in November 1992, under the chairmanship of Environment Minister Jean Charest, brought together members of our core delegation to Rio and Canadian institutions involved in the issues of sustainable development and was an indication that we will continue to build on the “multi-stakeholder” approach to environment and development questions as was so effective in the leadup to Rio. Secondly, in a ceremony in early December at the Reifel Game Sanctuary in Delta, BC, Prime Minister Mulroney signed the Biological Diversity and Climate Change agreements making Canada the first G-7 country to ratify both treaties.
In his speech, the Prime Minister also announced that the UN Secretary General would recommend to the General Assembly that Ms. Elizabeth Dowdswell from Environment Canada, who had played a particularly prominent role in the climate change negotiations, should become the next Executive Director of UNEP. This appointment is yet another reflection of Canada’s leadership in this area. On the international front, Canada will closely follow both the new Sustainable Development Commission (now responsible for monitoring the follow-up to UNCED) and the Earth Council (an independent body recently established in Costa Rica to keep high level attention on the issues from Rio).
Canada has also begun to implement commitments made by the PM at Rio to support developing countries in capacity-building and on the inter-related issues of aid, trade and debt. The IDRC has a newly expanded mandate related to Agenda 21. Canada will contribute $2 million to the start-up costs of the UNDP’s “Capacity 21” program of support to developing countries in their development of sustainability plans. On the aid side, CIDA has made its mission statement “the promotion of sustainable development in developing countries” Canada will build on the $1.3 billion we have spent on sustainable development over the past five years, including the expenditure in 1992 of $115 million on forest management in developing countries. The Prime Minister’s speech on 1 June 1992 also noted the relationship between environment and trade and suggested that the next round of international trade negotiations pay particular attention to environmental considerations. On the debt front, he announced a program to convert $145 million of debt in Latin America to fund sustainable development practices.
There will also be important follow-up negotiations to prepare for a high seas fisheries conference, in finding ways to proceed internationally on the forests principles (including a $10 million program toward an international network of model forests), participation in the Desertification Convention negotiations, and in other UN conferences and initiatives promised at Rio.
At the end of the day, however, what really counts is that there has been a good start made toward the integration of environmental considerations into our overall approach to development, trade and other economic issues. This will change the execution of Canada’s foreign policy for the better in the years ahead. As Maurice Strong said at the Closing Plenary at Rio: “International diplomacy will never be the same again”.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1993) — Winter 1993 // Hiver 1993, pp. 20–23. Read the rest of this issue →
