Despite its 40,000 plus participants and hangers-on, the Rio+20 conference was hardly headline-grabbing. It should have been because it was about saving the natural environment – and the fact that it wasn’t is a reflection not just on media news values, but also on what happened before and during.
In its Final Outcome Document, buried on page 20, under point 104, you get to read what the objective was: “to secure renewed political commitment for sustainable development, as well as to address the themes of a green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication and the institutional framework for sustainable development".
Measured against that objective, the conference surely failed. The extent to which political commitment for sustainable development was missing is revealed by the 55-page document’s language, derided by EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard as containing “too much ‘reaffirm this’, ‘reaffirm that’, instead of ‘we commit’ or ‘we decide’”. It has been damned as an “epic failure” by Greenpeace and, more diplomatically, “disappointing” by the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister. For all the presence of civil society, governments, the United Nations, business and campaigning groups, more than half of the world’s heads of state stayed away, including the largest polluters, which indicates how low down the conference fitted on the international policy agenda. And perhaps that heads of state were simply keen to avoid being associated with a predictable failure.
The outcome document expresses a broad and vaguely defined consensus that the international community should do more on eradicating poverty without having a negative impact on food security, water availability or access to energy. There had been a widely touted prospect of a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emerging to either succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which expire in 2015, or to complement new MDGs. Hopes were disappointed there too.
The criticism of the conference is pretty thorough, covering how it was done and what it did (and didn’t) – you can find good examples of these critiques here [4], here [5] and here [6]. For the UK, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg wondered out loud whether it might not have been better simply to walk away with nothing rather than the document that has emerged.
More evidence for this point of view could be found by looking at the sections on mining and climate change, issues that are crucial both to the environment and to security. There are many links between natural resource extraction and conflict and some of them have been widely discussed and subject to international campaigns and Hollywood movies. So it is rather extraordinary – yet predictable in such an anodyne text – that the outcome document covers mining without reference to conflict, merely the “importance of strong and effective legal and regulatory frameworks, policies and practices". The section on climate change has even less to offer. It’s another issue on which the importance of various issues is stressed but no commitments are made. Adaptation gets some “urgent priority” attention but most of the rest of the section deals with climate change to come – as though it were something that’s yet to occur, not that which has already taken place and locked in by existing greenhouse gas accumulation – and urges action on the Green Climate Fund [7].
And as for directly addressing the issues of insecurity, conflict and instability, nine brave words are directed at it:
“We recognise that each country faces specific challenges to achieve sustainable development and we underscore the special challenges facing the most vulnerable countries and in particular African countries, least developed countries, landlocked developing countries and small island developing States, as well as the specific challenges facing the middle income countries. Countries in situations of conflict also need special attention.”
All in all, the critiques are well justified but they are also bit off the point for two reasons. First, there was never any reason to expect anything better; a football stadium’s worth of people can turn up to discuss and lobby but the conference happened at a time of overwhelming economic uncertainty and worry. That distracts the minds of government after government and constricts what can get said about the relationship between economy and environment. It’s worth reflecting on the fact that governments have spent the past 20 years trying to get agreement on sustainability issues under the seriously organised and resourced intergovernmental climate change process and have failed. It is no surprise if they acted on the assumption that there was zero chance of getting that agreement at what was by comparison a sustainability festival in Rio.
Second, gloom about the overall outcome is obscuring what look like some positive agreements on narrower issues, which may be genuinely transformative for the lives of poor and vulnerable communities, particularly those that live in the shadow of armed violence. These could illustrate a new way of working that gets beyond the power blocs of the various G groups (G8, G20, G77) which did so much to limit what Rio+20 was able to achieve.
One announcement on the fringes of the conference that was especially relevant revealed that the Sustainable Energy for All (SEA) initiative has attracted $50 billion of commitments from companies. The business world was well represented at this conference, unlike 20 years ago. SEA was set up in September 2011. It takes a vision expressed at the 1992 conference – “We are all determined to act to make sustainable energy for all a reality". – and makes it real with costed pledges of support. Its goals are to:
- ensure universal access to modern energy services;
- double the rate of improvement in energy efficiency; and
- double the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix.
And it seems the lead actors in this are businesses acting in concert with the UN, with national governments standing to one side. HSBC, a contributor to the fund, said caustically [8]:
"While government negotiators haggle over a dwindling pool of traditional aid, the private sector is scaling up trillions of investment dollars a year for clean and accessible energy. This Initiative is an example of a new way of working for the UN, using its convening power to identify critical bottlenecks to renewables, efficiency and universal access, and then designing focused packages of policy incentives, public finance and private capital".
Over 50 governments will also be drawing up energy strategies in pursuit of the three goals under the initiative.
Speaking at Rio Ban Ki-moon, referring to the $50 billion of commitments already made to the SEA, said:
"These huge numbers give a sense of the scale and growth of investment going into sustainable development. They are part of a growing global movement for change. Our job now is to create a critical mass, an irresistible momentum".
Of the three goals the first is of most direct relevance to the 1.5 billion people who live in the poorest and most conflict-prone countries and territories in the world. Though this was not referred to at Rio+20, fuel price volatility generates food insecurity and shortages of other goods, which, alongside other pressures and especially where state institutions are weak, inefficient or corrupt, increases the risk of localised violent conflicts. In the differing circumstances of high-risk countries, these factors can feed endemic instability or fatally undermine confidence in a peace process that seems unable to deliver economic benefit.
The SEA will, of course, face the same governance challenges as any other large international fund and it remains to be seen how it might meet them, not least in conflict-affected and fragile situations where the ability to act in a conflict-sensitive manner is critical.
The SEA initiative offers one way into the work of strengthening the foundations of peace and prosperity. There are numerous other necessary tasks but it would be wrong to ignore this one because the overall mood was wrong.
That this happened on the sidelines of the conference suggests that these traditional inter-governmental forums on their own are inadequate for tackling the interlinking and complex factors that they set out to. Despite Rio+20’s undoubted failure, there may be some chinks of light to be found in the willingness of business, acting out of corporate responsibility and enlightened self interest, teaming up with UN agencies and showing national governments preoccupied with the immediacy of the economic crisis and the ongoing game of power politics, that thinking ahead and investing in long-term stability will ultimately pay real dividends.