The Rio+20 gathering in Brazil last week was little more than a self-indulgent festival of environmental inaction. The idea of holding a summit to mark the 20 years since the world leaders last pledged to save the planet is like holding a lavish anniversary party to celebrate a failed marriage.
To recap, in 1992, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (otherwise known as the Earth Summit), 172 nations and 108 heads of state met in Rio de Janeiro to plot a path to sustainability. From the summit came three non-binding declaratory statements (Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, Agenda 21 and the Forest Principles) and two legally binding treaties (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity). As their lofty titles suggest, these statements and agreements promised a better environment and a new way of doing business.
By and large, they failed. Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to climb and the condition of the world’s forests, fish stocks and water resources have steadily declined. Not all the news has been negative (of particular note has been the slowdown in the rate of deforestation since the mid-2000s) but the macro trends have been in one direction; backwards. Despite this, thousands of politicians, diplomats and environmentalists clocked up tens of millions of frequent flyer points to “celebrate” the achievements of the past two decades. Imagine what they would have done if we had made progress.
Of course, Rio wasn’t the first anniversary of global failure. In 2002, the great and good converged on Johannesburg to mark the 10th anniversary of the decision to “save the world”. At the time, Australian environmentalists were expressing concern at the apparent lack of action. Their theme was that, despite the promises, “we’ve gone in reverse”.
The more things change, the more things stay the same. Ten years later, the message is essentially the same: very little has been achieved. Things have got so bad that the head of one Australian environment group was quoted as saying that “we are looking for the conference to start a process of developing sustainable development goals”.
So 20 years after we agreed to act, the environment movements’ expectations are now so low that they merely hope to “start a process” to develop goals. The whole farce would be funny if the stakes weren’t so high.
Of course, it’s not just the environment that is on the receiving end of unfulfilled promises. What distinguishes environmental policy from other areas is the size of the gap between the rhetoric and action. Who will ever forget Kevin Rudd’s, “climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our time”? Rudd is not alone though. Ever since the original Earth Summit, governments have made an art form out of talking about sustainability while delivering little.
This is not to say that we should completely abandon multilateralism, or that Australia should walk away from the climate change or biodiversity conventions. What is needed is new ways of achieving change and a refusal to accept vacuous statements from governments as a substitute for action.
The first step in bringing this to fruition needs to come from researchers and environment groups. More resources need to be devoted to testing whether government promises are being fulfilled, and what policies work and don’t work. This is the uns-xy drudgery that many environmentalists steadfastly avoid. But without this information, there can be no momentum for change, no leaver to compel governments to fulfil their promises.
From there, the effort must be directed at ensuring we have policies that work rather than those that merely sound as if they might. The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act sounds impressive on paper but does little in practice. Having a policy package called the Clean Energy Future is no good if it doesn’t deliver on its name.
For too long, governments have tamed environmental concerns through words alone. This should be of concern to all taxpayers, not only those who have strong environmental preferences. At present, millions (potentially billions) of dollars are expended annually in Australia on environmental programs that we know don’t do anything, or for which we have no evidence about their cost-effectiveness. If governments are going to expend resources on the environment, they owe it to the taxpayer to ensure they achieve something.
One of the bigger ironies of the Rio+20 debacle is that it included a compilation tally of all of the spending promises of the countries involved. If green groups would start to demand evidence of success rather than support promises to spend we might have got somewhere by now.
*Richard Denniss is executive director of the Australia Institute and Andrew Macintosh is the associate director of the ANU Centre for Climate Law & Policy
Whilst a lot of good people are labouring away trying to hold ground, its like trying to use a broom against a tsunami. Under corporate rule, real govt action wont start until ecological collapse is imminent, then it will be too late.
If you weigh the facts and our environmental trajectory, you come to the conclusion this fate is inevitable.
Gee – first comment, the global politics of the environment are apparently not a topic of great interest to Crikey readers. Or Australian media in general. Twenty years ago the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) was front page headline stuff. My scrapbooks bulged with full page articles and opinion pieces from Australian broadsheets. Now? Local papers rely on syndicated articles – how many bothered to send a journalist?
then again, I wonder how many Australian NGOs were represented at the Forum. Perhaps they played a role in government delegations – I don’t know and I don’t know
In 1992, change seemed possible and UNCED was one of the global arenas where activists, corporations and earnest bureaucrats fought it out. Judge for yourself who won. It was the first time that words like biodiversity, greenhouse gas and global warming entered mainstream media and phrases like ‘precautionary principle’ were publicly contested. Most surprising from the vantage point of 2012, we find the word ‘ecologically’ in front of the cliché we now know so well, ‘sustainable development’.
I was working at the Australian Conservation Foundation in 1990 where staff numbers were swelled with taxpayers’ money to allow the organisation to put the environmental view in Resource Assessment Commission Inquiries and the committees formed for the Hawke Government’s ESD process in the run-up to UNCED. At the same time, public interest was at high levels not seen before or since; membership in all environmental groups was strong and donations generous. UNCED was a platform for key campaigns and its location in Brazil, made it accessible to activists of all stripes. Feminist organisations attended to try to curb the anti-women flavour of the Malthusians; development activists wanted to make sure that poor people didn’t get swept away in a middle-class view of the environment as a place without people. It was a cacophony of excitement and produced a number of declarations to rival those from the official conference. Preparation started months before the June conference – years for some groups) and went on long afterwards; in Australia, local government continued the conversation with local versions of Agenda 21. It doesn’t seem possible that text like Agenda 21 (http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_00.shtml?utm_source=OldRedirect&utm_medium=redirect&utm_content=dsd&utm_campaign=OldRedirect) could emerge from any meeting of global leaders these days. No-one has the time.
It seems odd that twenty years later, in the internet age, there aren’t more of us worrying about and taking action on the environment. Its so easy to keep informed and stay in touch. But we can do that at home and that means fewer people leaving their comfortable houses and computer screens to drive or wait for public transport to attend meetings, let alone go to rallies.
Reasons why the media, environment groups and most people aren’t interested in Rio + 20 may include:
–
All this without the
The failure of UNCED + 20 to capture the public
In fact nothing will be done until corporate profits start to suffer and large corporations demand government action. Of course this will be done with taxpayers’ money – they won’t want to pay for it. By then it will probably be too late. The outcome will be determined by the laws of physics. Let’s hope it turns out to be at the lower end of current projections.
Sorry – that comment went too early – its poorly edited and I can’t retrieve it to fix it – but to continue the list of factors:
– the UN system is poorly resourced, and not as well respected as it was in 1992. This is especially true for events where governments won’t look good (like this one) Maurice Strong was the powerful media-friendly face of UNCED in 1992 – who was it in 2012?
– Environmental NGOs lack the resources to develop campaigns around major global events; skype and chat rooms mean they don’t have to travel to meet, thus saving tonnes of greenhouse gas. International groups like Greenpeace were able to be at Rio in 2012 – and its dramatic highly visible protests. In Australia, there is a depressing lack of resources for many community organisations and certainly no financial support for critical evaluations of their government inaction.
– large UN conferences, especially when held in countries of the South like Brazil, are accessible to many social activists and they were there –
” There were plenty of poets among the ten of thousands of people gathering on the outside of Rio+20, most from Latin America, many indigenous people and peasant farmers, the people living closest to the land, suffering most directly from the sale of the earth, water and air to the highest bidder. The right people were there, they were just shut out, not listened to and beaten by riot police. Business as usual at meetings of the UN/WTO/G20, etc. etc.” (blog post from OccupyCOP17 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jun/25/rio-20-great-gatsby)
Not of interest to mainstream media whose focus is on governments.
The World Social Forum is the popular counter movement to the World Economic Forum and played a coordinating role in NGO preparations for Rio + 20. Its web site http://rio20.net/en/ suggests that not everyone was saying ‘ho-hum’ about Rio + 20.