hmmm that's very interesting if you're trying to sift through the debris (meatphorically) though irrelevant in the overall mess...

They came. They talked. And weasled. And left

In 25 years as an environmental writer, Geoffrey Lean had seen nothing like it. What a circus! What a show! But oh, what a missed opportunity! In this special report, he reflects on the week that the world came to Johannesburg and asked for the earth

08 September 2002

They came. They saw. They concurred. And that just about sums up what 104 world leaders achieved at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg last week. They did reach agreement, but whether what was agreed will make much difference to the twin crises they had all flown in to address – deepening world poverty and environmental deterioration – is doubtful indeed.

They came, they confessed to each other, from a world in deep trouble. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany told his fellow leaders how his country and the Czech Republic and Austria had just been hit by "the biggest flood disaster in their history", showing "that climate change is no longer a sceptical forecast, but bitter reality". From the other side of the globe, Saufatu Sopoanga, Prime Minister of tiny Tuvalu – which is due to disappear under the Pacific as sea levels rise with global warming – had a similar tale to tell. Just a few weeks ago he had "a very scary experience. It was at low tide, with no strong winds, when 10-metre waves washed right across the land".

Tony Blair reminded the gathering that "a child in Africa dies every three seconds from famine, disease or conflict". The day before, on his way to the summit, the Prime Minister had spoken of the billion people in the world without safe water to drink, the 2.5 billion without basic sanitation, the felling each year of an area of forest two-thirds the size of the United Kingdom, and the destruction and degradation of a third of the planet's coral reefs.

"We know the problems," he told the summit. "We know the solutions. Let us together find the political will to deliver them."

They came, they saw ... well, what did they see? A modern conference centre in the prosperous suburb of Sandton, all gliding escalators and cavernous halls, set in a plush shopping mall where signs for Gucci, Versace and Armani jostled with posters urging sustainable development; it could have been anywhere in the richest parts of the world. And they saw at least some of the more than 9,000 government delegates, more than 8,000 representatives of business and pressure groups, and more than 4,000 journalists, crammed into a building that the fire regulations said should have held only a third that number.

Some, such as Mr Blair, also went to see the teeming slum of Alexandra, where more than 350,000 people live in destitution within sight of the luxurious centre. But in all honesty it seemed that many delegates went less to see than to be seen, especially by the television cameras.

The leaders spoke in a huge assembly hall on the top floor of the eight-storey convention centre. The press was herded into a cavernous basement. In between, the hard negotiating went on in a series of committee rooms, with most of the toughest bargaining taking place amid relatively small groups in rooms off a fourth-floor corridor thronged with lobbyists.

Security was tight, so tight that the shops and restaurants around the conference area had to bring in supplies for the entire period before the summit began: food was stored in giant refrigerated vans in car parks beneath hotels. Everywhere the participants went they had to go through security scanners, manned by (mostly) friendly police, calibrated to go off if you left even a single coin in your pockets.

And they concurred. Or rather, the heads of state made speeches while their ministers and officials toiled through the nights in less public rooms to finalise a 65-page plan of action, and a much shorter declaration of political will. Mind you, that in itself was no mean achievement, given the differences they began with.

The preliminary negotiations had been disastrous, so delegates arrived in Johannesburg with more than 400 points of disagreement on the plan of action, and without having even begun to discuss the declaration. To reach any agreement from that start was like winning a Test Match after being forced to follow on.

And it was as well that they did. For as John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, told me in the only interview he gave during the summit, the whole system of multilateral negotiations built up through the United Nations over the past 50 years was at stake. If we fail here, he warned, things would "unravel on a scale we have not seen before".

Some senior figures in the Bush administration wanted exactly that to happen, since they find international agreements on everything from the environment to human rights, and from development to arms control, an unnecessary restraint on the activities of the world's only superpower. For everyone else it was therefore tremendously important that agreement was reached. Some seemed to get carried away by their relief. Margaret Beckett, the UK's chief negotiator, emerged from the negotiating room to profess herself "delighted" by the summit's meagre results. "I am in no doubt," she added, "that our descendants will look back on this summit and say that we set out on a new path."

John Prescott, in conversation, was more circumspect, describing it as "a small step for mankind". Fair enough – but it is less clear whether the step is forward, backward or sideways.

There was one important advance – the acceptance, in spite of determined opposition from the United States – of a target of halving the number of people in the world without even basic sanitation by 2015 (Perhaps by killing them with f16's methinks ha ha ha- Mick). But this was no more than a corollary of a target already agreed by world leaders at a summit in 2000, to halve the number without safe drinking water by then. It would have been outrageous if it had not been agreed, and it was cynical of an isolated US to hold the rest of the world to ransom on the issue.

That was about the only genuine advance. After a detailed comparison of the plan of action with previous agreements, Friends of the Earth concluded that it contained only one other new target, on establishing marine reserves – and even that was rather vague.

There was some slight progress towards making multinationals more accountable and looking at the over- consumption of resources by rich countries. But that is not much to show, especially after the EU, the conference chairman Nitin Desai, and leaders such as Mr Blair had set up concrete targets and timetables as the touchstone of the conference's success.

Against these gains the summit relaxed a previous target on halting the accelerating loss of wildlife species, agreed a timetable for renewing fish stocks that critics say will actually weaken existing measures, and slightly eroded some of the principles for protecting the environment laid down at the Rio Earth Summit 10 years ago and in subsequent negotiations.

Other steps were either sideways, or marching on the spot. Most disappointingly, the summit failed to agree a target for increasing the proportion of the world's energy generated from clean, renewable sources such as the sun and the wind. No issue better exemplified the twin concerns before the conference. For two billion people are without any form of modern energy, having to rely instead on wood and animal dung – which give off smoke full of chemicals that kill some two million people a year. Providing clean, renewable sources instead would cut this death toll, preserve precious topsoil by maintaining tree cover and leaving enriching dung – and also combat global warming.

Before the summit, a task force set up, on Mr Blair's initiative, by the G8 leaders – under the co-leadership of Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the former chairman of Shell – recommended concrete measures to bring renewable energy to a billion people by the end of the decade. But this, and all subsequent attempts to set even the most modest of targets, were shot down by Big Oil, represented by the Opec countries and the oilmen in the White House. They inserted clauses promoting nuclear power and the very fossil fuels that cause global warming.

This, again was the height of cynicism. For even if oil, gas, coal and nuclear power were unlimited, free, and caused no pollution, it would be simply impossible to get them – or grids carrying electricity generated from them – to the millions of villages scattered through the Third World. The sun, wind and other renewable sources which are distributed free by nature can therefore relieve poverty and protect the environment without even damaging the interests of the fossil-fuel and nuclear lobbies.

There were, therefore, plenty of villains at the summit. The US blocked the setting of any new targets or timetables, largely on ideological grounds – and overwhelmingly succeeded. The simmering frustration of delegates and activists finally boiled over when they booed and heckled Colin Powell – the most sympathetic member of the Bush administration – when he addressed the summit on Wednesday. The unprecedented scene provided vivid proof of the US's isolation, not just on the environment but a whole range of international issues.

The Opec countries shamelessly used the drawbacks of the UN system to oppose renewable energy. Most of the developing countries understandably wanted targets, some passionately. Latin America, led by Brazil, even put forward proposals to quadruple the use of clean energy by 2010. But in UN negotiations, all the Third World joins together in a single bloc, which traditionally takes its decisions by consensus. Opec exploited this by refusing to agree to targets, making it impossible for developing countries to do so. With the US and allies such as Australia, Japan and Canada also opposed, the EU – their only proponents – caved in.

The UN also must take some share of the blame. Britain's Stakeholder Forum for Our Common Future – a normally uncontroversial organisation which has perhaps worked more than any other worldwide with the UN to prepare the summit – became so frustrated that it published a long catalogue of instances where the UN had set up failure by taking the wrong decisions. And Mr Blair also won himself a wooden spoon by making only the most fleeting visit, spending just enough time to speak and be attacked by Robert Mugabe and Sam Nujoma, the President of Namibia, before leaving stony-faced, even earlier than scheduled, to give a press conference on Iraq.

Had he himself shown an ounce of the political will he called for, he could have made a difference, for example by working with Chancellor Schröder to secure a renewable energy target. But the possibility of tabloid stories about the cost of his hotel room if he had stayed overnight apparently weighed more heavily with him than the issues he professed to care about so deeply.

It is hard to overestimate the damage done internationally by the cursory treatment of the summit by the absent President Bush and the transient Mr Blair, while they were apparently preparing for war. The rest of the world got the impression, rightly or not, that they were obsessed with the impossible task of trying to bomb out terrorism while caring little about tackling the poverty that gives rise to it. This will surely be immensely counter-productive.

There was, however, one genuine hero: Tewolde Egziabher, a slight, asthmatic Ethiopian who heads his country's environment protection agency. Twice, by the sheer force of his somewhat diffident personality, he turned the whole conference around. On the first occasion, the summit seemed set to take a big step backwards by giving the World Trade Organisation, which allows no obstacle to free trade, the power to override international environment agreements. This threatened to nullify treaties which, for example, control trade in hazardous waste and toxic chemicals, phase out the substances that destroy the ozone layer, and enable countries to refuse imports of GM crops and food. Just as everything seemed lost, Mr Egziabher made an impassioned late-night speech that shamed the rest of the Third World and then the EU into voting down the plan. No one could remember a personal intervention having such an effect. Then he did it again, personally frustrating a US move to negate the small progress made on corporate responsibility.

The South African government also deserves praise for skilfully handling the negotiations and mounting a logistically flawless conference. And there were silver linings. The biggest was a hugely significant by-product of the summit: the announcement by Russia and Canada that they were moving to ratify the Kyoto Protocol combating global warming. Their ratification, under the complicated rules of the treaty, would bring it into force. This alone would make the summit a success – and do more to stimulate the spread of renewable energy than the proposals that had been defeated.

Then the summit confirmed a series of other targets, notably those of the Millennium Summit two years ago, which set out goals for halving dire poverty by 2015, and the Monterey Summit earlier this year, which unexpectedly led to promises of big aid increases by the US and the EU. These set out a framework which, in principle at least, bind even the Bush administration to tackling the poverty and environmental crises.

Next, the development and environment lobbies came closer together, with groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth helping to lead the fight to tackle world poverty. The combination could be immensely powerful for the future.

And finally the fringes of the conference launched well over 100 partnerships between business, governments and non-governmental organisations to take practical action to address the crises (Greenpeace and business even buried the hatchet to campaign together on global warming). What they will achieve remains to be seen, but they mark a new development for the UN in involving the rest of society in its affairs. Many believe that it marks the beginning of change. "The summit's decisions will be forgotten in a year," says Felix Dodds of the Stakeholder Forum. "But Johannesburg may be remembered as the start of a new kind of international action."

If that is so, it may mark a big step forward after all.

The one unambiguous success in the summit's plan of action. Leaders agreed to halve by 2015 the number of people – 2.4 billion – without basic sanitation, after an isolated United States dropped dogged opposition to setting the target. If implemented, this could do much to reduce the 2 million deaths a year, mainly of children, caused by drinking contaminated water. In fact, the world had already agreed at an earlier summit to cut by half the number of people without safe drinking water.
Score: 10/10

The big disappointment of the summit. The US and Opec would not endorse a target for renewable energy. They killed off a Brazilian proposal backed by the rest of Latin America and other developing and developed countries to quadruple the world's use of clean energy to 1 per cent by 2010. They even sabotaged a much more modest EU plan for a 1 per cent increase over the decade. The summit did at least discuss energy: the US and Opec stopped previous meetingsaddressing it.
Score: 1/10

The summit agreed that the Global Environment Facility, the world's main funding mechanism for global environmental problems, should be allowed to finance the fight against the desertification which threatens one third of the world's land area. It undertook to rebuild fish stocks "where possible" by 2015, but critics believe this may undermine existing agreements. It refused to phase out agricultural subsidies or to support organic and fair trade products, and left the door open for GM crops.
Score: 3/10

The plan hinted at action to tackle the greatest extinction of species since the dinosaurs died out, by obliquely referring to "the achievement by 2010 of a significant reduction in the current rate of loss of biological diversity". But this wording is much weaker than an undertaking "to stop and reverse the current alarming biodiversity loss" which the world's governments agreed only last April. The summit took a step backwards – and no one expects anything much to be done anyway.

Score: 0/10

The summit agreed a weaker text than expected, promising to "encourage and promote" a 10-year programme to combat over-consumption in rich countries, rather than to actually set it up. The EU pressed for action, but the US, Canada, Australia and Japan vigorously resisted. Proposals to support labelling of environmentally friendly goods were defeated. But the action plan does say that countries must develop better policies on consumption and production.

Score: 3/10

Surprising headway was made, mainly due to pressure groups, who forced it on to the agenda. Governments accepted that binding rules could be developed to govern the behaviour of multinational companies. The US resisted tooth and claw, and tried various ploys to exempt itself, even after the matter was settled. But the plan of action stops short of setting a timetable for the regulations, or even firmly saying that they should be introduced.

Score: 4/10