Eddie Koch
The World Summit in South Africa to assess what the world’s governments have done since they met in Rio 10 years ago to devise emergency plans to stave off environmental catastrophe will have to contend with a pair of gloomy trends: accelerated environmental decline and loss of political will to reverse this.
Global environmental trends have reached a dangerous crossroads, says State of the World 2001, released this year by the Worldwatch Institute.
“Signs of accelerated ecological decline have coincided with a loss of political momentum on environmental issues, as evidenced by the recent breakdown of global climate talks. This failure calls into question whether the world will be able to turn these trends around before the economy suffers irreversible damage,” says the Washington-based research organisation.
“Governments squandered a historic opportunity to reverse environmental decline during the prosperity of the 1990s,” says Christopher Flavin, president of the institute and co-author of the Wordwatch report. “If, in the current climate of political and economic uncertainty, political leaders were to roll back environmental laws or fail to complete key international agreements, decades of progress could unravel.”
The Worldwatch Institute poses the central challenge for World Summit 2002 in this way: “With many life-support systems at risk of long-term damage, the choice before today’s political leaders is historic, even evolutionary, in nature: whether to move forward rapidly to build a sustainable economy, or to risk allowing the expansion in human numbers, the increase in greenhouse gas emissions and the loss of natural systems to undermine the economy.
“Unless fossil fuel use slows dramatically, the Earth’s temperature could rise to as high as six degrees above the 1990 level by 2100, according to the latest climate models. Such an increase could lead to acute water shortages, declining food production and the proliferation of deadly diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.”
The report notes that failure to enforce many existing international environmental agreements is hampering progress on many fronts. It argues that South Africa can play a key role in reversing this trend.
State of the World 2001 calls for stronger enforcement of treaties, and for increased North-South co-operation, particularly among the environmentally and economically influential E9 countries: China, India, the US, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Japan, South Africa and the European Union.
One example of the potential influence of the E9 countries is the effort to slow climate change. They account for nearly three-quarters of greenhouse gas emissions. A collective commitment by the E9 to new energy systems could have a dramatic impact on energy markets and reduce the rate of global warming.
One of the critical constraints, which South Africa as host of the 2002 summit will have to confront, is the US administration’s conservative environmental policies.
President George W Bush’s decision to abandon the US’s commitment to the Kyoto Protocol has created the most serious international environmental policy crisis in years, says Flavin. It puts at risk a decade of efforts to craft an agreement to protect the world from climate change.
The US is a key player in the climate problem, accounting for a quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions and nearly half of the increase in emissions since 1990, the institute’s latest figures show.
However, says Flavin, the best way to bring the US into the climate treaty process is for other countries to proceed with Kyoto, with the US joining later.
The South African NGO Coalition has called on the government to endorse the Kyoto Protocol as the host nation of the summit and to set an example that would put moral pressure on recalcitrant governments to follow suit.