[A-List] Earth summit: How to save the world in 10 days

[Mark Jones <markjones011@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Earth summit: How to save the world in 10 days
More than 60,000 people and 100 world leaders have descended upon 
Johannesburg to talk the world out of poverty, degradation and violence. 
What will it take, asks Geoffrey Lean, to translate the words into action?
25 August 2002
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60,000 delegates, 100 world leaders, one aim: saving the planet
How to save the world in 10 days
What kills 2.2 million people a year? Dirty drinking water. Now swallow this...
Welcome to Johannesburg, the African city 'that works'
'Ask about our lives and you will not stop weeping'
10 tips for rescuing the planet (11 if you steer clear of the summit too)
Leading article: Visionary or lapdog? Your planet needs you, Mr Blair
Britain asks African leaders to turn up the heat on Mugabe
Today 60,000 people are assembling in this tarnished, crime-ridden city of 
gold for the world's largest ever conference, one that will arguably 
determine the future of the planet. But they are coming a week too soon.
They are arriving early because the whole conference has been moved forward 
by seven days so that it can end on a different date. For, whether by 
coincidence or serendipity, the World Summit on Sustainable Development 
was, years ago, scheduled to climax on 11 September 2002.
The shift was understandable enough after last year's atrocities. President 
Bush, argued the organisers, could not possibly turn up if it meant being 
out of the country on the anniversary ? and the summit's decisions could be 
swamped by an avalanche of media retrospectives.
But symbolically it was a shame. For the summit, which will be attended by 
more than a hundred world leaders (though not, after all, by George Bush), 
provides the best chance for two decades to tackle the poverty, misery and 
hopelessness in which terrorism breeds. Success here could begin to build a 
more secure world as well as a cleaner, more prosperous one. And failure ? 
the more likely prospect ? will inevitably exacerbate the spiral of 
poverty, degradation, mass migration and violence.
John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister ? who in the last two years has 
met some 100 environment ministers and about 30 heads of government to try 
to lay the foundations for success ? says: "If we can get the world to 
deliver against terrorism, surely we can get it to deliver against poverty. 
If we can't then people will get the message."
Mr Bush, however, seems incapable of getting the point. He has decided that 
a holiday on his Texas ranch is more important than the future of the 
planet. A senior White House official says, with perhaps more truth than 
intended, that the summit's agenda "strikes at the core values of the 
President". And just to pour bomber fuel on the flames, the President is 
inviting his chief hawks down to the ranch this week, while the summit is 
sitting, to discuss war on Iraq and other military adventures.
However, his Secretary of State, Colin Powell ? who has been pointedly 
excluded from the council of war ? sees it clearly. "Sustainable 
development is a security imperative," he writes in the latest issue of Our 
Planet, the magazine of the United Nations Environment Programme. "Poverty, 
environmental degradation and despair are destroyers ? of people, of 
societies, of nations. This unholy trinity can destabilise countries, even 
entire regions."
Nature is also clearly trying to drive the message home. The summit meets 
near the epicentre of a tightening famine, which is threatening 10 million 
people ? including six million children under five ? across southern 
Africa. In Zimbabwe, one of the countries most affected, the crisis has 
been made immeasurably worse by the policies of Robert Mugabe, who is due 
to turn up here to put his case to the other leaders. But elsewhere ? in 
Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Swaziland and Lesotho ? the main cause is 
drought. Meanwhile, the worst floods in centuries have devastated much of 
central Europe, and there have also been severe inundations in China and 
Latin America.
Increasingly, global warming is being blamed. And it is all going to get 
much worse. As the facts on page 20 show, the world is trapped in a whole 
series of mutually reinforcing environment and development crises.
By now it was not supposed to be like this. Ten years ago a similar 
assembly of the world's leaders met for the Earth summit in Rio and 
promised to set the world on a new course. They signed treaties on 
combating global warming and protecting wildlife and sparked a host of 
others, including agreements to fight land degradation, protect fish stocks 
and control toxic chemicals. And they agreed an environment and development 
blueprint for the new century, called Agenda 21.
But as Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, admits, implementation of the 
decisions has been "far from satisfactory". Most notably, the rich world 
has comprehensively failed to live up to its promise to increase aid to 
help poor nations to develop in a sustainable way. Instead aid has fallen 
to its lowest ever proportion of rich countries' wealth. Every single 
wealthy country, except Denmark, has cut aid, often heavily. Meanwhile, the 
debt burden carried by the Third World and the former Soviet countries 
increased by a third.
Time is now getting desperately short. Almost all the major environmental 
crises are escalating out of control, and poverty and despair continue to 
deepen, particularly in Africa. Maurice Strong, who successfully ran the 
first two Earth summits ? in Stockholm in 1972, and in Rio ? warns: "I am 
convinced that if we do not change course in the first years of this new 
millennium, the prospects for the world's future will be ominous." Yet so 
far the Johannesburg summit looks far from producing the change of course 
the planet so urgently needs. The last round of preparatory negotiations, 
in Bali in June, ended in disaster with disagreement remaining on some 200 
points.
The US in effect refused even to negotiate at Bali. But it was not the only 
culprit. The Opec countries suborned most of the rest of the Third World 
into killing plans to increase renewable energy. And, by almost universal 
agreement, the incompetence and complacency of UN officials in charge of 
the negotiations and the summit has made things very much worse.
Key delegates arrived here last week to continue negotiations even before 
the summit began on a political statement of intent and a plan of action, 
but it is an uphill task. Meanwhile, frustration is beginning to boil over 
among pressure groups angry at the lack of progress and at the extent to 
which multinational companies are being involved in the summit by the UN.
The South African government has drafted in 26,000 police and has sworn to 
get tough with demonstrators. On Thursday the first demonstration, a 
hundred or so people singing and dancing outside the conference centre, was 
met by armed police and helicopters. Fears are growing that there could be 
bloody confrontations, as at the world trade negotiations in Seattle.
"I believe the protests will be peaceful," says Bobby Peek, the 
internationally respected director of Groundwork, a grass-roots 
organisation. "But I also believe that the police will deal with them in a 
way that will make them violent."
More radical voices, drawing inspiration from Seattle, have vowed to "shut 
down the summit". And the notorious "war veterans" who occupied Zimbabwean 
farms are rumoured to be on the way.
Yet just as things look at their worst, there are signs of hope. The 
breakdown in Bali has shocked everyone, even the Americans, into trying to 
prevent a complete disaster. A meeting of a few heads of state in Rio in 
late June, and follow-up meetings of top officials in New York, started to 
clear the air and make some progress. And many countries have been quietly 
strengthening their delegations, including the US, which has decided to 
send Colin Powell.
Mark Malloch Brown, the Briton who runs the UN Development Programme, told 
me late last week: "There is a serious effort being made on all sides to 
try to make this work, though everyone realises that there is a huge hill 
to climb." As the formal texts before the conference have got thinner and 
thinner, he and Louise Fréchette, the UN's Deputy Secretary General, have 
drawn up documents with their own suggestions for measures to tackle the 
crises in water, energy, health, biodiversity and agriculture. These ? with 
American support, but in the face of resistance from some governments and 
UN officials ? will be debated in plenary session on the first four days of 
the summit in an attempt to generate some momentum while the formal 
negotiations plod on in back rooms.
Meanwhile governments, industry representatives and pressure groups will be 
getting together at a host of meetings around the summit to agree joint 
programmes of action to tackle the crises, in what Mr Malloch Brown 
describes as "a great global village green". Some environmentalists are 
suspicious that multinational companies will influence the process, but 
almost everyone agrees that the idea is good in principle ? if the 
governments also agree to act and do not just use it as an excuse to do 
nothing.
Felix Dodds, the executive director of Britain's Stakeholder Forum for Our 
Common Future (a little-known organisation that has nevertheless been the 
source of many of the most hopeful initiatives at the summit), says that 
Johannesburg could be the beginning of an entirely new kind of process 
involving pressure groups and business as well as governments. "We have to 
move beyond protest as normal and beyond business as usual," he says.
We sure do, and fast. For the planet will not wait. And it will not be 
enough merely to avoid failure at this summit, if the challenges thrown 
down nearly a year ago on 11 September are to be addressed. That change of 
course is getting more urgent with every day.