Agendas for Sustainability

Environment and Development into the 21st Century

Mary MacDonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134732722
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Agendas and Sustainability considers the processes used for devising global environment and development agendas and provides practical suggestions for their future development and influence. A collaboration of the latest research from the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Earth Council, the book presents similarities and differences in problem definition, objectives, principles, priorities and actions across eleven of the major agendas put forward for environment and development after Rio.
Points of divergence and areas of common ground are investigated for over 30 environment and development-related topics, such as biodiversity, consumption patterns, trade, urbanization, population, education, deforestation and water resources.

1
A BIG BUILD-UP

Gun-toting soldiers perched atop buildings and hillsides surrounded by sandbags and radar aerials while down at ground level a Zen master painted Chinese characters defining the personality traits of passers-by. This milling throng included celebrities like Jane Fonda, Pelé, Jacques Cousteau and Shirley MacLaine. Inside there was a VIP area called the ‘golden corridor’. Outside, the poor and homeless had already been rounded up and shipped across the bay, out of sight and, for two weeks at least, out of mind.

So what was all the fuss about? For months the international media had been enchanted by this thing called the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The week before it began, it had filled more than fifteen pages in Time and Newsweek. During the event, there were daily front-page reports in every major newspaper in the world and footage on every television newscast.

This was the Earth Summit. It was held in June 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, where more than 100 heads of state and delegations from over 170 countries had come to put the finishing touches on what was being billed as an agenda for the twenty-first century. Along with national delegations and accredited media, more than 30,000 people with no official status at the UN Conference on Environment and Development also descended upon Rio. Many of them were involved in their own negotiations of ‘alternative treaties’.

The watching world, subjected nightly to images of rainforests falling and wildlife disappearing, could have been forgiven for thinking that the conference was only about the environment. But this was to be a very different animal. The Earth Summit was designed to combine wise management and conservation of the natural environment with economic equity and access to basic needs for all people. And somehow it had to find a way to mesh these seemingly competing goals in a manner that would allow them to be pursued in perpetuity.

Some history

The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,¹ in which she made a powerful argument for the link between pesticide use, widespread pollution and the resultant devastating effects on the health of humans and other animals and plants, is often cited as the moment the environmental movement began to take shape. From that point onward there has been a growing awareness of the need to balance human needs with the well-being of the natural world.

By the end of the 1960s the United Nations was discussing environmental issues² and in 1972 the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm. This meeting highlighted the different approaches of developed and developing countries to environment and development, many of which continue to this day.³ The Stockholm Conference is credited with the emergence of environmental policies and accompanying institutional support including environment and natural resource ministries in many countries. The United Nations Environment Programme was also created in its aftermath.

The Stockholm Conference resulted in two documents—the Stockholm Declaration on Human Environment and the Action Plan for the Human Environment—which were among the earliest government-sanctioned attempts to set an agenda for global action in response to environment and development problems. Yet they did not contain a clear recognition of the universal nature of environment and development issues. Over the next twenty years it would become startlingly obvious that many activities undertaken in one part of the globe could have profound consequences in another part of the world or could damage common resources such as the atmosphere or the oceans.

‘Globalization’ is the term often used to describe the rapid movement towards an integrated global market.⁴ But economic activity is not the only global phenomenon to be recognized in recent years. The depletion of the ozone layer was the first global environmental issue for which an international accord was struck. In the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (1987; revised 1990) processes and products involving chlorofluorohydrocarbons and related substances are controlled and restricted by nations according to an agreed schedule. During the mid-1980s more and more scientists and then governments expressed concern about the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its potential to change the climate. The loss of genetic diversity which accompanied the clearing of large tracts of land for agriculture and other types of development around the globe was also being recognized.

The publication of Our Common Future, the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development⁵ (known as the Brundtland Commission after its chair, Gro Harlem Brundtland), provided another boost to international interest in sustainable development. Our Common Future was released in 1987 after a series of consultations in many countries featuring the input of people from different backgrounds including government, environmental and development NGOs, business, education, indigenous peoples’ groups and academia. The mandate of the World Commission on Environment and Development was to formulate ‘a global agenda for change’.

The Commission put forward a working definition of sustainable development, the value of which is still debated. The report stated that,

In essence, sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations.

By the twentieth anniversary of the Stockholm Conference, marked by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, it was accepted that there were a number of problems which could only be labelled as global and to which the most appropriate response was a global one. The Earth Summit resulted in five major documents, including a declaration, The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, two conventions—The Convention on Biological Diversity and The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—a statement, Statement of Principles on Forests, and a broad, detailed, 400-page plan of action known as Agenda 21. ⁶

The Earth Summit was a milestone in inducing governments to address the relationships between environment and development rather than view them as separate issues. It was also a time of great optimism. Ambassador Razali Ismail of Malaysia, an outspoken representative for developing countries at Rio and President of the UN General Assembly in 1997, recalls: ‘I recognize 1992 as the time when all of us hit the zenith of commitment on environment and development’.⁷

At the Earth Summit, Agenda 21was hailed as the blueprint for a better world. More than 170 governments committed themselves to it, although their signature was not binding and the plan of action did not require ratification. Five years later the Statement of Commitment from Earth Summit +5, a United Nations General Assembly Special Session on progress since the Earth Summit, pronounced:

We acknowledge that a number of positive results have been achieved, but we are deeply concerned that the overall trends for sustainable development are worse today than they were in 1992. We emphasize that the implementation of Agenda 21 in a comprehensive manner remains vitally important and is more urgent now than ever.⁸

Emergence of agendas

By the time early drafts of Agenda 21started circulating to begin government negotiations, a number of other agendas were being brought forward by global networks of NGOs, grassroots organizations, the science and academic communities, the private sector and indigenous peoples. The purpose of this book is to assess the value of agenda-setting as a means for moving to a more sustainable future. The agendas used for this investigation are:

• Agenda 21
• The NGO Alternative Treaties⁹
• Agenda Ya Wananchi: Citizens’ Action Plan for the 1990s¹⁰
• Agenda of Science for Environment and Development into the Twenty-firstCentury¹¹
• Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living¹²
• Women’s Action Agenda 21¹³
• The Global Assembly of Women and the Environment¹⁴
• Youth ’92: The World Youth Preparatory Forum for UNCED¹⁵
• Youth Action Guide on Sustainable Development¹⁶
• Voice of the Eagle: The Final Warning Message of the Indigenous People of Mother Earth¹⁷
• Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Development and Environment¹⁸

All these agendas came into being in the two years before UNCED. Several of them supported lobbying efforts during the UNCED process, particularly with respect to the government agreement, Agenda 21. All stressed the need to question prevailing priorities and actions in the many areas relating to environment and development.

Taken together, the eleven agendas listed above amount to around 1,500 pages of statements, goals and recommended actions for achieving sustainable development (and they are not the only agendas that came forward at the time of UNCED). Why did so many people put their time and talents into drafting agendas for environment and development? Perhaps the success of the Montreal Protocol on Ozone made it appear that the political climate was ripe to take action on the underlying causes of environmental destruction and social deprivation. The Montreal Protocol had given governments experience in talking about and negotiating on a complex issue which had economic, social and ecological dimensions.

The general public, too, had become more sensitive than ever before to the threats posed by unchecked industrial activity in many parts of the globe. In the early 1980s it was recognized that acid rain was crossing national borders in North America and northern Europe and killing lakes in countries where it was not being produced. People already knew about the depletion of the ozone layer and, by the early 1990s, they were also hearing a great deal about carbon dioxide emissions and their link with climate change.

More than ever before, people were asking questions about the reasons for these problems and the answers were seldom straightforward. It seemed impossible to talk about cutting carbon dioxide emissions, for example, without addressing economic losses or social impacts such as the loss of jobs.

Within this context, many people saw the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development as an opportunity to push their ideas for change. Organized groups, particularly those familiar with political lobbying, set about putting their suggestions into formal documents. And so many agendas came into being, some quite similar, others completely different but all with two things in common. They all asked, and in many cases, demanded, a change. They all shared hope.

2
THE AGENDA-SETTING PROCESS

With the exception of government delegations, most of the agendas were prepared by a self-selected group—that is, individuals who were motivated to participate in working for change rather than elected to represent a certain constituency. These people felt confident that they could speak in a representative fashion for the group with which they were most strongly affiliated. Many of the documents underwent a relatively lengthy drafting process which included broad consultation within a given sector.

Agenda 21

Prior to UNCED, four Preparatory Committee (PREPCOM) meetings were held involving the UNCED Secretariat, interested government delegations and observers. Agenda 21was first put forward as a discussion document by the UNCED Secretariat between the second and third PREPCOM. The initial document was much shorter in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table
• Forward
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• 1: A big build-up
• 2: The agenda-setting process
• 3: Economic considerations
• 4: Social development
• 5: The Well-being of ecosystems
• 6: Agenda 21 and other sustainable development agendas
• 7: Progress on the implementattion of the agendas
• 8: Agenda-setting for sustainabillty
• Notes