BEGINNING YESTERDAY and slated to run over 10 days, the World Summit on Sustainable Development is under way in Johannesburg, South Africa. Some 100 heads of state or government and some 50,000 delegates have gathered for the Summit. This is easily one of the most important international meetings of recent times as the largest ever international meeting on sustainable development.
The main aim of the Summit is to generate an action plan to implement Agenda 21 and the goals of the Millennium Summit. Agenda 21 emerged out of the UN Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. As the Johannesburg Summit Overview puts it, "the roadmap for achieving sustainable development was adopted ten years ago at the Rio Summit. But there is still a long way to go. The Johannesburg Summit is expected to bridge the implementation gap through proposals for concrete action."
Implementation is always the big problem, even as the world faces environmental and development disasters on a massive scale. A whole series of international meetings have been held on environment and development from the UN Conference on Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972. While there have been some successes in dealing with problems, mostly on the local level, the largest problems of global sustainability have only grown worse.
Greenhouse gases and global warming have not been contained, while the largest polluter, the United States, has refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty, which seeks to cut emissions. Species loss and global climate change continue apace, as do loss of forests and rising pressures on fresh water resources and the loss of ozone.
As one wire service report puts it, the WSSD Plan of Implementation contains a "sea of brackets" meaning points of disagreement about action for sustainable development. The Summit presents itself as "a major opportunity for the world to move towards a sustainable future one that will allow people to meet their needs without harming the environment." Agreeing on what those needs are and how they are best to be met is the hard part, and already there is pessimism in some quarters about whether Johannesburg can take us beyond Rio.
We in Jamaica have our own critical problems of sustainable development, which are the sort of issues that should figure prominently in the present election campaign. We have sent a delegation to Johannesburg. Large, practical commitments coming out of the Summit would be a real breakthrough.
