Glenda Daniels and David Macfarlane South Africa is due to spend R36-million hosting a major international conference on the environment, the 2002 Rio+10 global summit, but has set aside a fraction of that for a national strategy to protect the environment.
Despite the government’s stated commitment to developing such a strategy, a workshop recently hosted by the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism and the IUCN-World Conservation Union disclosed only in its final minutes that the government had allocated a paltry R1-million to it. The government is looking at bagging more resources for developing an environmental protection strategy, says the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism’s chief director (planning and coordination), Paul Maclons. Formulating such a strategy is a two-year process that will take a number of avenues, he said. South African industry to a large degree depends on cheap water, cheap energy sourced almost exclusively from coal and cheap labour. A national strategy for sustainable development (NSSD) could shift the country away from energy-intensive and polluting industries. “One of the main tasks of the NSSD must be to provide guidance, offer alternatives, and empower people to make decisions that result in sustainable actions. If President Thabo Mbeki is serious about sustainable development, commitment must be shown in directing money away from wasteful projects like nuclear energy and an inflated defence industry. The NSSD is not a process that can be treated as a window- dressing exercise,” said Lafras Heron, Earthlife Africa activist. A strategy for sustainable development is “not just about achieving a healthy environment but about achieving improved living conditions for disadvantaged communities, providing sustainable employment in jobs that are not harmful to workers’ health and their neighbouring communities, and addressing the fact that poor communities bear the heaviest burden resulting from over-consumption by the privileged minority”, says Richard Worthington, coordinator of Earthlife Africa. The 2002 Rio+10 summit follows from the watershed 1992 United Nations conference held in Rio de Janeiro and usually known as the Earth Summit. The 2002 summit will be the first time since the Rio conference that heads of states and governments have gathered to assess progress on sustainable development. The outlook is ominous, according to the United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Environmental Outlook, released last year. The report says “the world water cycle seems unlikely to be able to cope with demands in the coming decades, land degradation has negated many advances made by increased agricultural productivity, air pollution is at crisis point in many major cities and global warming now seems inevitable”.
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