Harmonizing Environmental and Developmental goals.

• Author: Weizsaecker, Ernst von
• Position: Globe Glance - Outcomes of summits on sustainable development

The World Summit on Sustainable Development is the third event in a row. The first was the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. In its wake, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was founded in Nairobi, and several UN agencies made some moves towards an ecological significance of their programmes. Ten years later, a meeting to assess progress since Stockholm was held but ended in disappointment.

Continuing deterioration of the environment was reported chiefly in developing countries. As a consequence, the World Commission on Environment and Development was created to study the reasons for that lamentable state of affairs, and Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Norwegian Prime Minister, was appointed Chairperson. After three years of intensive work, the Commission published in 1987 its report, "Our Common Future", which was submitted for discussion at the UN General Assembly that year. As a result, the United Nations decided to convene another conference, this time on environment and development, which was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992.

The Rio "Earth Summit", the second in a series of UN conferences, had three major results: the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity and Agenda 21, which was seen by many observers as a prescription leading to, if properly applied, sustainable development, a term already found in the Brundtland Report. Five years later, the General Assembly held a special session in New York, with a view to look back on and assess the progress made since Rio.

Once again the assessment was rather depressing from the point of view of the environment, thus the United Nations again decided to hold another major conference--the World Summit on Sustainable Development--in Johannesburg, South Africa in August/September 2002.

It is difficult to avoid the impression that UN conferences and reports have not been able to slow down, let alone stop or revert, the destructive trends. To be sure, pollution control has made major progress in the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), but then pollution is no longer the main ecological concern.

Global warming seems to go on unmitigated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1) fears that the added greenhouse effect might lead to a rise in average temperatures by some 2[degrees]C to 5.8[degrees]C during the twenty-first century. This could...