Sustainable Development and Green Communication

African and Asian Perspectives

J. Servaes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349460564, 9781137329400
• eBook ISBN: 9781137329417
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Offering a comprehensive overview of contemporary theoretical and programmatic issues in the fields of sustainability, culture, communication, development and social change, this book explores the relationship between communication and sustainability from a social change perspective.

Part I

Setting the Stage

1

Sustainable Development and Climate Change: Beyond the Rio + 20 Summit

Kosta Kostadinov and Jagadish Thaker¹

The Rio + 20 Summit

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), popularly known as Rio + 20, was held on 13–22 June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It marked the 20th anniversary of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Earth Summit, and the 10th anniversary of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg, South Africa. Mandated by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly Resolution No. 64/236 (A/RES/64/236), the Rio + 20 Summit focused on two main themes:

1. a “green economy” in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication; and

2. the institutional framework for sustainable development.

The first Rio Conference in 1992 led to several important outcomes, among them the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. It also affirmed the concept of sustainable development as encompassing economic and social development along with environment protection to guide priorities for international negotiations. Moreover, the 1992 Rio Conference put together the Agenda 21 action plan, comprising a set of guidelines for sustainable development in the twenty-first century. The action plan brought forth the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a treaty on climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the Convention on Biological Diversity. With climate change issues coming to the fore of international negotiations, most popularly during the Conference of Parties (COP) 15 in Copenhagen in December 2009, which was attended by numerous heads of state, there were high expectations for the Rio + 20 Summit results.

The three objectives of the Rio + 20 Summit were to

• secure renewed political commitment for sustainable development;

• address the progress and implementation gaps of previous commitments; and

• address new and emerging challenges.

It was hailed as the largest UN-organized summit, having been attended by 130 heads of state and government, ministers and diplomats from 180 countries, and by over 50,000 attendees (Vidal, 2012).

The outcome of the Rio + 20 Summit was a document titled “The Future We Want”, which renewed the political commitment to promote an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable future. Some of the important action plans in the document underlined the need to develop Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), similar to the Millennium Development Goals set to expire in 2015, with more emphasis on protection of the environment and detailing the use of a “green economy” for sustainable development. Steps were taken toward a more comprehensive set of indicators other than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), among others. Governments, corporations, civil society groups and others pledged more than $513 billion toward developing these initiatives for a more sustainable future (http://www.uncsd2012.org/). Nevertheless, the outcomes of the Rio + 20 Summit fell short of expectations and the negotiations ended with no legally binding agreements.

As with other international meetings, which see a lot of debate and finger-pointing over keywords and definitions, the Rio + 20 Summit discussions were also filled with much acrimony. The central contestation during the negotiations between developed and developing countries was the role of a “green economy” replacing the focus on sustainable development. The G77-China group, along with other developing countries, insisted that an emphasis on a “green economy” at the expense of social, economic and environmental protection would lead to the promotion of green industries while leaving behind the important aims of poverty reduction and energy access, which developing countries perceive to be among their primary concerns (Khor, 2012; Sanwal, 2011). Similarly, they feared a “green economy” would give rise to unilateral “green” trade barriers and would become a new conditionality for international aid and finance. Many civil society organizations also raised concerns that the concept of a “green economy” would lead to the commodification of nature and the rise of “nature markets”, where natural resources, such as water and forests, would become available for international trade, while local communities would be forced to withdraw their rights to such resources. Furthermore, developing countries were also concerned that a “green economy” would interfere with their sovereignty in national policy and implementation processes, a deviation from the original Rio principle of respect for individual member states’ sovereignty to decide and implement their own policies commensurate with their national priorities. Finally, they also feared that the Rio + 20 Summit outcomes may ignore the core principle of differentiated responsibilities and require, for example, countries such as China and India to commit to the SDGs on a par with the developed countries (Jayaraman, Kohli & Mittal, 2012; Sanwal, 2011).

“The Future We Want” assuaged some of those fears by acknowledging the lack of progress from earlier commitments, centralizing eradication of poverty as an “indispensable requirement” for sustainable development, incorporating concerns about national sovereignty, strengthening of finance and technology transfer mechanisms, and urging countries to refrain from trade protectionism, among others. It also affirmed the principle of common but differentiated responsibility, enshrined in Principle 7 of the original Rio Declaration.

The final Rio + 20 Summit document is still lacking in several major objectives. One of the major critiques of the Summit was the lack of a concrete, legally binding framework for a sustainable development future; instead, deferring the process to various select committees to be negotiated later, and relying on voluntary pledges from governments and the private sector. For example, member countries agreed to set up a 30-member group to come up with SDGs to be presented at the 68th session of the UN Assembly. In particular, there were no concrete outcomes on the issues of technology and finance transfer to developing and underdeveloped countries so that they could move toward adopting SDGs without sacrificing national priorities about increased energy access and poverty reduction. In place of mandatory transfer of technology and funding, the outcome document referred to only “mutually agreed” terminology (Khor, 2012). Further, it deferred the process of the establishment of a mechanism for finance and technology transfer to 30 experts, tasked with coming up with finance proposals by 2014.

More noteworthy among the Rio + 20 Summit’s achievements are:

• underscoring the importance of strengthening international environmental governance in the context of an institutional framework for sustainable development by strengthening and upgrading the role of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) through increased funding; and

• establishing a high-level political forum in place of the Commission on Sustainable Development.

Although the Rio + 20 Summit failed to achieve any legally binding agreements, it survived the test of continuing the international dialogue on SDGs in times when international negotiations often seemed to end without any outcomes (Khor, 2012). The process of negotiations, however, did suggest an increasing trust deficit between the developed and the developing countries to act collectively toward a common set of goals. At the same time, the Summit also witnessed an increasing consensus between different civil society organizations, non-governmental organizations, and indigenous groups from across the world, on the need for more ambitious SDGs that emphasize environmental and social components of sustainable development, in contrast to a singular focus on “green” growth. It became increasingly clear that developing countries such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa, among others, are the main forces of economic growth in this century, consuming more resources as they transition millions of people out of poverty (Papa & Gleason, 2012). The policies such countries would adopt and the speed with which they would implement the changes not only depend on the ambitions of individual countries for “green growth”, but also on other contentious issues such as technology transfer from developed to developing countries.

The discourse contests between the developed and the developing world about the role and responsibility of individual countries to contribute to common goals is not limited to sustainable development objectives alone and is also present at the annual UNFCCC Conference of Parties (COP) meetings. With climate scientists ever more certain that humankind has become the primary driver of climate change, and its impacts becoming increasingly visible, particularly in poor and developing countries, the goals of sustainable development are increasingly recognized in alignment with an effective international agreement on climate change mitigation and adaptation (Sathaye et al., 2007; Yohe et al., 2007).

Sustainable development and climate change: The case for an integrated approach

Sustainable development emerged as an important international issue in the 1980s, as international policy negotiations increasingly centered around the negative effects of existing economic development models on environmental standards by threatening to exhaust the resources of the earth (Redclift, 1987). The concept of sustainable development, often defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland Commission, 1987), seeks to align economic, social and ecological dimensions by articulating alternative development pathways. Some critics point out that the concept of sustainable development is too vague (Gibson, 1991), or fear that the stress on sustaining development, equated with a singular focus on economic growth, would lead to ignoring the core underlying principles of equity and social justice (e.g., Redclift, 1987; Robinson, 2004; Servaes, 2013). Others also argue that the term may be coopted by governments and businesses to make only cosmetic changes, or “greenwashing”, without fundamentally shifting growth pathways (e.g., Athanasiou, 1996; Greer & Bruno, 1996; Najam, 1999; Tokar, 1997). Nevertheless, by balancing economic and environmental priorities, and the promise of building alternative development perspectives, it seems to have gained international currency among policy makers and has become central in several international negotiations (Robinson, 2004; Gawor, 2008).

According to the World Meteorological Organization, the year 2012 was one of the hottest years on record (WMO, 2012). Rising temperatures have resulted in accelerated melting of Artic sea ice to record levels, whereas many countries experienced extreme weather events such as heat waves, severe droughts and floods. Although climate scientists claim that no one extreme weather event can be directly linked to climate change, they believe that climate change has most likely increased their intensity and frequency. The effects of such disasters, however, are distributed unequally, with the poor in underdeveloped and developing countries being the most vulnerable. For example, from 1970 to 2008, over 95 per cent of deaths related to natural disasters occurred in developing countries (IPCC, 2012). Moreover, climate change is said to most likely affect yields of many crops, and increase the prevalence of infectious diseases such as malaria in tropical countries, thereby threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. As a result, the effects of climate change, particularly in developing and underdeveloped countries, may not only impede their economic progress, but reverse the development trend achieved in the last decade (see UNDP 2007–2008 Report).

Climate change refers to the changes in the earth’s average temperature patterns due to increased accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, primarily as a result of human activities. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the UN’s primary scientific body that assesses climate change science and releases periodic reports – the warming of the earth’s climate change is unequivocal, with “eleven of the last twelve years (1995–2006) ranked among the twelve warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850)” (IPCC, 2007). Scientists maintain that climate change will not only have short-term impacts such as increasing the intensity of natural disasters, but will also have long-term impacts on people’s food, economic and livelihood security by causing shifting regional weather patterns, which will have a subsequent effect on crop yields. Further, it is expected that developing and poor countries will acutely feel the negative impacts of climate change given that large parts of their populations are dependent on climate-sensitive livelihoods, such as agriculture. According to the Stern Report (Stern, 2007), countries need to spend 1 per cent of global GDP to stop greenhouse gas emissions immediately, or risk paying between 5 per cent and 20 per cent of global GDP later for damages due to climate change.

As human activities are seen as the primary drivers of climate change, it seems imperative that rising climate change concerns must be addressed within the context of sustainable development efforts, which centralize the issue of human production and consumption patterns and emphasize the linkages between social, economic and environmental concerns. The increase in emissions of greenhouse gases from industries and the transportation sector, for example, has been identified as the primary cause of recent climate changes. Therefore, addressing the issue by redesigning the transportation sector to be more public-friendly, fuel-efficient and less fossil fuel dependent would require addressing the socially and culturally embedded patterns and processes of production and consumption.

It seems increasingly feasible that the current emissions of greenhouse gases will result in disastrous climatic conditions in future due to the laggard effects inherent in the Earth’s climatic system. This means that the core principle of intergenerational equity in sustainable development – that the present consumption of resources does not undermine the ability of future generations to use such resources – is also directly linked to the climate change problem.

Another important attribute to sustainable development, enshrined in the UNFCCC principles, is the concept of equity as in equitable access and distribution of resources for the most vulnerable groups, such as the poor and rural women within and across countries (Yohe et al., 2007). Climate change negotiations, however, have often focused on equity between countries, mostly between developed and developing countries, without paying sufficient attention to equity for the poorest and most vulnerable countries, as well as equity within individual countries (Jayaraman, 2012).

Finally, it has to be pointed out that the development goals to secure sustainable economic prosperity for all are inherently tied with climate change action plans. Building environmentally friendly cities, for example, will help not only secure the SDG of increasing access to resources, but will also address climate change challenges. The most visible linkage between sustainable development and climate change is in the area of clean energy production, which is increasing access to energy for millions of people without degrading the environmental resources in the process of power generation.

The concept of sustainable development as comprising economic, social and environmental issues was affirmed at the 1992 Rio Summit, when climate change was still a nascent issue. Yet the 1992 Rio Summit led to the establishment of the UNFCCC, the UN’s primary intergovernmental body that convenes annual meetings between 193 countries to seek policy measures for climate change mitigation and adaption. In the 20 years since then, climate change has turned into one of the biggest challenges humanity faces in the twenty-first century. For that reason, the Rio + 20 Summit was considered an important juncture to centralize the issue of climate change within the broader context of sustainable development.

The Rio + 20 Summit’s report, “The Future We Want,” acknowledges that the negative impacts of climate change will undermine efforts for sustainable development, particularly for developing and poor countries. Further, it recognizes that policies such as improving energy efficiency and increasing the use of renewable energy are important for sustainable development as well as for mitigating the effects of climate change (see Sathaye et al., 2007). Climate change and sustainable development are interlinked within the context of sustainable energy, where, on the one hand, policies are adopted to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases from energy production and consumption and, on the other, access to clean energy is provided to millions who still lack access to any form of modern energy sources. Similarly, the document calls for increased measures to address biodiversity conservation, ocean acidification, desertification, deforestation, among others – issues that are closely tied with climate change.

Just as energy-efficient and renewable energy sources are important to mitigate the effects of climate change and promote sustainable development, so is the issue of adaptation. Adaptation to climate change refers to proactive and reactive mechanisms by individuals, communities and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction: Imperatives for a Sustainable Future
• Part I Setting the Stage
• Part II Information and Communication Technologies for Development
• Part III Communicating the Cost of Social Change
• Part IV Conclusion
• Index