Rio+20: Justifiable Anger
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Albert Einstein
By the time the heads of state and official delegations met at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the latest reprise of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (20–22 June 2012), many civil society organizations, large and small, had spent precious human and financial resources over two years to engage with the consensus makers in preparatory processes, arguing for state obligations urgently to reverse rampant environment destruction and economic disparity across the planet. What did they get for their investment?
While claiming to seek “sustainable patterns of consumption and production,” the official conference and its outcome document suggest that this signifies maintaining current practices. Civil society and other critics have insisted that simply conducting business as usual is far from good enough, especially in light of ongoing multiple crises due to botched and corrupt governance.
The seminal 1992 Earth Summit was credited with inspiring two historically significant outcomes: the development of the Biodiversity Convention and the creation of the UN Panel on Climate Change. The two are inextricably linked and mutually interdependent. The 1992 conference and commemorative World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) at Johannesburg, in 2002, maintained worldwide agreement on the formula for “sustainable development” as comprising the economic, environmental and social (equity) dimensions. However, Rio+20 has offered nothing new.
The Rio+20 conference was supposed to mark two decades of progress after the ground-breaking 1992 Earth Summit. However, most observers have noted that the main promises and principles laid out at Rio in 1992 have been plainly broken. One grave indicator of the deterioration of the planet and its political leadership is the fact that today`s levels of greenhouse gases are rising more rapidly than before the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change came into being.
The Oceans Rescue Plan for the High Seas was the environmental-protection package that held out longest in the debates. However, an unholy alliance of the United States and Venezuela, together with Russia and Canada, sabotaged that initiative during the wee hours of Tuesday morning, 19 June.
Civil Society Sidelined
Another related development since 1992 was the weighty presence and involvement of corporate representatives and their interests at this year’s summit. The governments’ conspicuous coupling with private interests at Rio+20 may explain why the outcomes reflect a consensus formed around an alliance of agents seeking ever-greater consumption and production, only cynically dubbed as “sustainable.”
Some see this as a predictable culmination of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s “Global Pact,” unveiled at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, on 31 January 1999. That initiative sought partnership with corporations that nominally affiliated with the UN’s human rights, environmental and anticorruption principles. However, it involved no accountability to those principles, or impartial mechanism for monitoring their implementation.
Habitat International Coalition’s former President Davinder Lamba recalled the 1992 Earth Summit from the civilians’ perspective, observing that, “in 1992, when UN officials tried to introduce business interests into multi-stakeholder sessions on sustainable environment, civil society bitterly opposed the token corporate infiltration.” Speaking from the Rio+20 conference center, he said “This time around, corporations are running the show.”
Bill McKibben, of 350.org, assessed the Rio+20 summit bluntly as a joke. He reminisced: I remember Rio 20 years ago, a source of hope, but we are now losing the environmental battles. There is nothing in this text to change that, just some wistful declarations.
Greenpeace activists were among those marching on the opening day of UN summit, labeling the conference Rio Minus 20. Greenpeace Executive Director Kumi Naidoo pointed out that, “although this high level meeting comes 20 years after the first Earth Summit, a majority of the 17 principles charted in 1992 have not progressed, but degraded.”
The final statement from the Major Group of women’s civil society organizations affirmed that Rio+20 also left women “disappointed and outraged.” Executive Director of Women in Europe for a Common Future (WECF) Sascha Gabizon, a key coordinating group, noted that “Two years of negotiations have culminated in a Rio+20 outcome that makes almost no progress for women’s rights and rights of future generations in sustainable development. The Women’s Major Group has worked around the clock to maintain women’s rights and commitments to gender equality that have already been agreed to, but gaining affirmation of those rights left no time for real progress and commitments to moving toward the future we need.”
The estrangement of civil society from Rio+20 was both real and symbolic. The “People’s Summit,” the organized parallel event engaging civil organizations and the public, was staged a safe 40 km distance away from the official meetings. That made civic engagement at Rio+20 logistically complicated, adding to the expense in time, cost and carbon output for civil society to play an effective part. To wit, the official “parallel event” convening urban social movement spokespersons and the UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing was relegated off-site to a deserted arena.
“Sustainable Development Goals”
“The Future We Want” document does coin a new concept of “sustainable development goals” (SDGs). These are not to supplant the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), set to expire in 2015. However, according to the Rio+20 outcome document, SDGs “should address and incorporate in a balanced way all three dimensions of sustainable development and their interlinkages” (para. 246). This approach could serve to permit the restitution of the social (equity) dimension to the MDGs, whose human rights content was stripped out in the process of distilling the MDGs from the more international law-referenced Millennium Declaration (2000).
Windel Bolinget, of the Igora indigenous community in The Philippines, represented the Cordillera People`s Alliance at both the 1992 and 2012 summits. He argues that a fourth dimension is essential to the concept. From an indigenous perspective, he explained, Our people`s cultural worldview is that humanity must be in harmony with Mother Nature. We should treat nature as a source of living, not extraction. [For t]he multiple crises that the world is facing today—economic, social, political and climatic—we, indigenous people, have much to offer [as] solutions.
“Green Economy”
To accommodate the dwindling enthusiasm over carbon-emission reductions marked by the recent Bonn Climate Conference in May, UN officials announced that the emphasis at Rio would be green economies across the globe, not tackling climate change.
Convening under a supposedly shared concept of “green economy,” Rio+20 participants found a new and cynical interpretation of this standard notion as ushering in an era of unbridled exploitation of nature for profit. The inertia achieved at Rio+20, as conveyed in the outcome document, “The Future We Want,” [Arabic] shows no new commitments from governments and flight from the notion of existing state obligations.
According to Professor Tim Jackson, author of the influential book Prosperity Without Growth, Rio+20 failed not only to offer new hope to humanity. He believes that the 190 heads of state and ministers who signed the final document actually have betrayed the vision of a green economy in a staggering failure of responsibility.
Civil society movements eventually have come to reject the green economy initiatives promoted by the UN as the most pragmatic approach to dealing with environmental crises.
Windel Bolinget explained: When we look at the policy proposals of the draft document drawn by [the UN Environment Programme] UNEP, basically the green economy is converting nature as a capital, so it is basically the commodification of nature, our carbon credits and ecosystem. The corporations are to make cash value of these investments. It does not address the root causes of climate change such as nuclear power, extractive industries, the polluting of rivers and [the destruction] of our Mother Earth.”
Most observers outside of government and big business consider Rio+20 to have been a failure of epic proportions. Mere citizens have formed their own consensus that the people did not get “The Future We Want” in Rio, because of their irresponsible leaders. In these times of mass uprisings and “occupy” movements, civil society anger at the failure of Rio+20 may indicate that the true conference outcomes remain to be seen.
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