More than two years after the United Nations Earth Summit in 1992, on the eve of the UN's 50th anniversary, its legacy remained hard to define. "The millennium it ain't," Bella Abzug, the former American congresswoman and women's advocate, had said on the last day of the conference. "But it's a great beginning." By 1994, many wondered about even that.
Friends of the Earth, an international citizens' group, said the summit agreements represented little more than "business as usual." They and other nongovernmental critics saw the Rio de Janiero conference as simply a reaffirmation of the very developmental values that had helped create the environmental crisis in the first place.
"At school you teach us to behave in the world," 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki, the daughter of an outspoken Canadian environmentalist, said in a UNICEF-sponsored speech to the delegates in Rio. "You teach us not to fight with others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share and not be greedy. Then why do you go out and do those things you teach us not to do?" Maurice Strong had said in his keynote address that nations must remain ever-conscious that "we are all in this together." But, by 1994, there was little evidence that governments had taken his warning to heart. The financial commitments Strong and others sought not only never materialized; the overall level of development assistance from the 24 industrialized rich countries actually plummeted 10 percent between 1992 and 1993, from $60.8 billion to $54.8 billion-a result partly of a long-running global recession. "Even the rich are feeling poor," he said.
The collapse of communism had yielded nothing resembling a hoped-for "peace dividend." Indeed, with the end of the competition among superpowers for influence over the developing nations, there was less overseas development money than before. Extreme poverty continued to spread, even in the developed nations, while unemployment and signs of social distress deepened on a global scale.
The UN Commission on Sustainable Development, set up to monitor implementation of Agenda 21, the summit's 800-page "blueprint" for sustainable development, bemoaned the lack of money for development and what seemed to be an overall lack of momentum, but offered little hope it could do much to improve matters. "Development is in crisis," Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali declared gloomily in May 1994.
Little was done to redress the summit's most singular failure-the collapse of efforts to save the world's forests. Two years later, the developing countries were still accusing the industrial nations of hypocrisy and obstructionism, and the timber continued to fall, at a rate estimated at close to 200 square miles a day.
The Framework Convention on Climate Change, negotiated separately and signed in Rio, remained essentially toothless thanks to the efforts of US President George Bush. He had opposed "targets and timetables" for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, calling them a threat to jobs and free enterprise. The Framework Convention on Biological Diversity, an agreement to conserve the world's plant, animal and microbial species, fared better. Bush had disavowed it as unfair to American companies, but his successor, Bill Clinton, agreed to sign a version with the understanding that businesses would be offered more patent protection for products made from genetic material found in the rain forests of developing nations. But by 1995, ratification efforts remained stalled in Congress.
Late in 1994, Under Secretary-General Nitin Desai, an Indian economist who had worked for two years alongside Strong and Brundtland, told the General Assembly that, while the momentum had ebbed somewhat, progress had been made. He cited, among other things, the October 1994 signing of a treaty to combat land degradation and desertification, especially in Africa; a 1994 global conference on how to promote sustainable development in environmentally fragile small-island nations; and advances in talks on controlling marine pollution, the export of hazardous waste and coastal-zone management.
For many people, including numerous diplomats, the summit's most palpable single accomplishment was to legitimize the role of nongovernmental organizations as players in the negotiating process-an unprecedented development in the history of a famously insular organization. By 1994, with the UN in the midst of a series of major follow-up conferences on various aspects of development, the presence of NGOs in the inner sanctums of government negotiators had become routine. Desai-chief of the UN's newly created Department for Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development-told the General Assembly that the high level of citizen involvement in the Commission on Sustainable Development was already one of Rio's most enduring accomplishments.
Strong, who had startled some supporters by returning to Canada to head up a giant utility known as Ontario Hydro, commented that, while there had been "a natural tendency to lapse back to business as usual, there are encouraging signs that Rio has given rise to an explosion of interest and initiatives at the grassroots level."
Despite the mixed results and dashed hopes, many believe that the Earth Summit will come to be seen as the UN's first step toward fulfilling a promise of its 1945 charter: to be "a center for harmonizing the actions of nations" in solving international problems, building the economic, social, cultural and humanitarian conditions for a peaceful world.
"We now have a framework for global environmental cooperation and a set of principles for global environmental action," said Dr. Noel Brown, the former North American Regional Director of the United Nations Environment Program. "The common ground has been found."
By: David E. Pitt, (excerpt from Safeguarding the Environment), from: A Global Affair: An Inside Look at the United Nations, published by Jones & Janello, copyright 1995, all rights reserved.
