With the captains and the kings departed, what is the legacy of the World Summit on Sustainable Development? It is ambiguous, suggesting that world leaders are starting to grapple with the threat to our planet, but are not yet ready to go the required distance.
As a logistical and diplomatic success, which passed off without major disruption and forged consensus from many contending interests, the summit was good for South Africa and the African continent. It put world poverty definitively on the map, and spotlighted Africa and its needs with unprecedented clarity.
The consciousness-raising aspects of the exercise should not be understated. Even the United States, whose contemptuous and self-centred stance was epitomised by President George W Bush’s boycott, felt the heat and gave ground. It cannot have enjoyed the tongue-lashing it received from traditional allies.
The Rio summit 10 years ago identified “Planet, People, Prosperity” as the three pillars of sustainable development, and the Johannesburg conference built on this. It produced a blueprint for action which, though fudged and fragmentary, tries to integrate environmental, social and economic concerns. A number of targets hotly disputed before and during the summit, notably sanitation, were finally accepted. And despite its loud complaints of being consigned to the margins, the Left has emerged more organised, visible and united. A significant feature was the consolidation of the environmental lobby, under the Eco-Equity coalition, and its coalescence with the development, anti-poverty and anti-globalisation lobbies. Green activism is not about cuddling small furry creatures and neglecting the poor, as the African National Congress would have us believe. It is about saving the world from the triple calamity of environmental, social and economic collapse. The summit has underlined as never before that integrated agenda.
The question is: did the conference go far enough, given the apocalyptic forecasts of United Nations scientists that the world may have just 30 years to avert the widespread disintegration of human society?
Its greatest failure was in not setting firm targets and time tables for renewable energy, with the US government — effectively the executive arm of big business — again the major stumbling block. Dangerous emissions are almost certainly a factor in increasingly volatile climate change, and play an undisputed role in human disease and in degrading water, vegetation and soil. It is true that pollution is a growing threat in the Far East, but at least China has undertaken to sign the Kyoto Protocol. With Russia following suit, and Australia now agreeing to revisit its stance, the world’s richest and most powerful nation stands alone among the major powers.
The summit did set the soft target of “controlling” chemical effluents damaging to people and the environment by 2020. Again the question is whether this is anywhere near adequate given the urgency — some green lobbyists pressed for a 2010 deadline. On the preservation of biodiversity, the tough wording of the original proposal was substantially diluted.
As host, broker and actor, anxious to advance a development agenda while ensuring the summit was a diplomatic success, South Africa was pulled in several directions. South Africans cannot be proud that the prime facilitator of the fudged deal on renewables was the Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Valli Moosa.
The world, and particularly its superpower, has not yet shown it can subordinate narrow national interests in the greater cause of the planet. In the US case, isolationism and a tendency to aggressive unilateral action have unquestionably been reinforced by the events of September 11 last year.
The test now is how to enforce the imperfect summit accord, given that its undertakings are voluntary. There may still be time to do what is required, and do it quickly.
Goon brigade
During the apartheid era liberal South African universities, Wits at the forefront, clung jealously to their independence. By sheltering voices of dissent the state wanted silenced, they became beacons that signalled the freedom that would one day be possible.
Universities like Wits developed a rule at the time: the state’s apparatus of repression — police and the military — was not allowed on campus. There were times when they invaded to suppress protest, but the universities’ moral authority was so great and the outcry so loud that apartheid’s goons were forced to retreat.
On Monday a different squad of goons, but not altogether dissimilar in conduct to the goons of apartheid, invaded the Wits education campus in Johannesburg to shield Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres from dissent. The university had no prior warning Peres would speak, and did not invite his security men, who coordinated local heavies they brought along.
When students and lecturers wanted to enter the campus and the auditorium where Peres was to speak, many were turned away by these heavies because they appeared Muslim or were otherwise deemed racially unsuitable.
That may be the way the Israeli government handles dissent in Palestine. But, Mr Peres, we don’t need your racism here. We’re done with it.