Towards Johannesburg.

• Author: Ruyt, Jean De
• Position: Essay - World Summit on Sustainable Development

"If national governments are basically unilateral in their attitudes towards global problems, anarchy will prevail over international governance and what should be our global village may turn into a global jungle."

-Gro Harlem Brundtland, addressing the "Earth Summit", Rio de Janeiro, 13 June 1992

World leaders will gather in JOHANNESBURG, South Africa from 2 to 11 September 2002 for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Their task will be to undertake an overall review of the decisions taken at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development--the Earth Summit--including the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21, created to provide a comprehensive road map towards sustainable development.

One in two jobs worldwide--in agriculture, forestry and fisheries--depends directly on the sustainability of the ecosystems. But today's environmentally unsustainable practices are in fact plundering our children's future heritage. We have certainly made progress since the Earth Summit, but we must face an inescapable reality: our responses are too few, too little and too late. Against this backdrop, expectations will be high at the Johannesburg Summit. How do we address these and together build a new ethic of global stewardship?

National preparations are well under way to produce crucial tools for the implementation of sustainable development goals. These tools, rather strategies for sustainable development, will provide the cornerstone for implementation at the domestic level in the years to come. They will be all the more effective if they include targets to reverse the current trend of environmental loss, as well as intermediate and sectoral, quantitative and qualitative targets on environmental and resource productivity. The intergovernmental regional events are also under preparation and cover extraordinarily diverse processes, ranging from climate change negotiations to the International Conference on Financing for Development. These events will be instrumental in renewing consensus and commitment for sustainable development. The challenge will then be to build ownership of these regional processes at UN Headquarters in New York and somehow reach consensus at the international level.

At Johannesburg, we should first take measures to protect the natural resource base of economic and social development. We need to commit ourselves to new international targets to reverse the trend in loss of environmental resources and enhance...