'Undoing the damage we have caused'.

• Author: Rutsch, Horst
• Position: Ensuring Environmental Sustainability

The World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 26 August to 4 September, concluded with world leaders declaring that the "deep fault line" between rich and poor posed a major threat to global prosperity and stability. In response to these challenges, the Summit set specific global targets in poverty reduction, clean water and sanitation, and infant mortality, and also addressed related problems in agriculture, biodiversity, climate change, renewable energy and trade. The Johannesburg Summit, the biggest-ever United Nations conference, with 191 countries participating and over 21,340 accreditations, brought together 104 heads of State and Government.

Adopting the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development and reaffirming their commitment to Agenda 21, which was adopted ten years earlier in Rio de Janeiro, world leaders stated that although globalization had created new opportunities, enabling the rapid integration of markets and increasing the mobility of capital and investment flows, benefits and costs were unevenly distributed. "We risk the entrenchment of these global disparities", the Summit acknowledged, "and unless we act in a manner that fundamentally changes their lives, the poor of the world may lose confidence in their representatives and the democratic systems to which we remain committed, seeing their representatives as nothing more than sounding brass or tinkling cymbals". The Declaration noted that the global environment continued to suffer from the loss of biodiversity, depletion of fish stocks, advancing desertification, worsening climate change, more frequent and devastating natural disasters, and increasingly vulnerable develop ing countries.

The Summit also adopted a wide-ranging Implementation Plan, which aims to tackle many of these challenges by 2015 and calls for:

* halving the proportion of the world's population who live on less than $1 a day;

* halving the number of people living without safe drinking water or basic sanitation;

* reducing mortality rates for infants and children under five by two thirds; and

* reducing maternal mortality by three quarters.

The Implementation Plan also calls for: "with a sense of urgency" a substantial increase in the use of renewable sources of energy, although it sets no specific targets; implementation of a new global system for classification and labelling of chemicals; and restoration of depleted fish stocks. It urges States that...