Results of the World Summit on Sustainable Devleopment

John Dernbach

The purpose of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was to review actions taken to foster sustainable development in the past ten years, to reinvigorate efforts to achieve sustainable development, and to “focus on action-oriented decisions in areas where further efforts are needed.” Thus, the idea was not to renegotiate Agenda 21, the plan of action for sustainable development agreed to at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, but to make further progress in implementing it. Accordingly, WSSD resulted in two negotiated outcomes – a Plan of Implementation and the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development. This article reviews these documents. Type II outcomes or partnerships (commitments by nongovernmental entities) are outside the scope of this summary.

Background
The 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment laid the foundation for the international consensus that it is the responsibility of governments to protect and improve the environment for both present and future generations. In 1983, the UN General Assembly established the World Commission on Environment and Development to establish a global agenda for recommended changes essential to achieve sustainable development by the year 2000. The World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) in 1987 defined “sustainable development” as development “that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The Brundtland Commission report led to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In Rio, more than 178 governments adopted Agenda 21, a global plan of action for sustainable development, on-line at http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/agenda21.htm. A significant institutional outcome of UNCED was the establishment of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) in December 1992, to ensure effective follow-up of UNCED. See http://www.johannesburgsummit.org/html/basic_info/csd.html. Ten years later, the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development was convened in Johannesburg, South Africa, to focus on implementation of Agenda 21 through various strategies.

Held under the auspices of the United Nations, the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was hosted in Johannesburg by the South African government during the period Aug. 26 to Sept. 4, 2002. According to the United Nations Development Programme, over 50,000 people attended it and related events. See http://www.undp.org/wssd/. Participants included representatives from over 190 governments, inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations (including the American Bar Association), the private sector, civil society, academia, and the scientific community. 

Plan of Implementation
The Plan of Implementation is divided into sections covering poverty eradication, changing unsustainable patterns of consumption and production, protecting and managing natural resources, sustainable development in a globalizing world, health, small island developing states, Africa, other regional initiatives, means of implementation, and the institutional framework for sustainable development. The Plan of Implementation, which is 54 pages in length, describes poverty eradication “as the greatest global challenge facing the world today and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development” (¶ 6). This emphasis is reflected in the plan’s more specific commitments.

Much of the negotiation focused on “targets and timetables” – commitments to achieve specific results by stated dates. More than 30 such targets and timetables are contained in the Plan of Implementation. Some of these reaffirm commitments that were previously agreed to in the U.N. General Assembly’s “Millennium Declaration” in 2000. These include the following (all from ¶ 19 of the Millennium Declaration):

• to halve by 2015, “the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than one dollar a day.”
• to halve by 2015 “the “proportion of people who suffer from hunger.”
• to halve by 2015 “the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water.”
• to ensure that by 2015 “children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling and that girls and boys will have equal access to all levels of education.”
• to reduce “maternal mortality by three quarters” of its 2000 rate by 2015, and to reduce “under-five child mortality by two thirds” of its 2000 rate by 2015.
• to halt and have begun to reverse, by 2015, “the spread of HIV/AIDS, the scourge of malaria and other major diseases that afflict humanity.”
  
  The Johannesburg Plan of Implementation also contains the following new targets and timetables:
• to halve by 2015 “the proportion of people who do not have access to basic sanitation” (¶ 7).
• to develop “integrated water resources management and water efficiency plans by 2005” (¶ 25).
• to restore depleted fish stocks “on an urgent basis and where possible not later than 2015” (¶ 30).
• •to improve developing country access “to affordable, accessible, cost-effective and environmentally sound alternatives to ozone-depleting substances by 2010”
  (¶ 37(d)).
• that states should take “immediate steps to make progress in the formulation and elaboration of national strategies for sustainable development and begin their implementation by 2005” (¶ 145(b)).

In some cases, countries were unable to agree on specific, categorical targets and timetables, and settled on softer language. Thus, countries agreed to “substantially increase the global share of renewable energy sources”(¶ 19(e)), but not to a date or a percentage share. (There was no agreement on even a soft target for phasing out subsidies for unsustainable forms of energy production.) They did not agree to undertake a ten-year work plan “of regional and national initiatives to accelerate the shift toward sustainable consumption and production”; they agreed only to “[e]ncourage and promote the development” of such a work plan (¶ 14). Countries agreed to only to “aim...to achieve by 2020 that chemicals are used and produced in ways that lead to the minimization of significant adverse effects on human health and the environment” (¶ 22). The Plan of Implementation notes that “achievement by 2010 of a significant reduction in the current rate of loss of biological diversity” would require new funding, technical resources, and a variety of actions at all levels (¶ 42); it does not commit to that goal. Countries agreed to “[p]hase out lead in lead-based paints and other sources of human exposure” (¶ 50), but not to a date for phase-out. Similarly, they agreed to support an African initiative to secure access to energy “for at least 35 per- cent of the African population within 20 years,” (¶ 56(j)(i)) but not to the objective contained in the initiative.

In addition, many important outcomes are not stated as targets and timetables. For instance, countries agreed to “[e]nhance corporate environmental and social responsibility and accountability” through various means (¶ 17). They also agreed to ask the Global Environment Facility, which funds sustainable development activities in developing countries under certain conventions, to make activities under the Desertification Convention “a focal area” of its funding (¶ 39(f)). The Plan recognizes that significant new financial resources will be needed to implement these commitments. It does not contain new commitments, though; it refers to prior commitments made (for example, in the March 2002 Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development) and encourages countries to increase existing commitments (¶¶ 75 & 79). It also calls on countries to reduce “unsustainable debt burden through such actions as debt relief” (¶ 83).

Describing education as “critical for promoting sustainable development,” the Plan recommends that the U.N. General Assembly “consider adopting a decade of education for sustainable development, starting in 2005”
(¶¶ 109 & 117(d)). The plan also recommends further work on sustainable development indicators (¶ 119 sexties). Countries also agreed to “[e]nhance the integration of sustainable development goals” into the operations of relevant U.N. agencies, and to strengthen collaboration among international bodies (¶ 122). Countries reaffirmed their commitment to the Commission on Sustainable Development as the international entity to review progress toward sustainable development (including progress under the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation), but noted that it needs to add more value to the implementation process by, among other things, focusing more on actions that enable sustainable development and on identifying both obstacles and means of overcoming them (¶¶ 127-32).

Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development
The four-page Johannesburg Declaration is a political statement that endorses the plan of implementation and states “our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life and to our children” (¶ 6). It identifies “poverty eradication, changing consumption and production patterns, and protecting and managing the natural resource base for economic and social development” as the “overarching objectives of, and essential requirements for sustainable development”
(¶ 11). It describes the growing gap between developed and developing countries, global environmental deterioration, and globalization as major challenges for sustainable development (¶¶ 12-14). The Declaration also commits countries “to expedite the achievement of the time-bound, socio-economic and environmental targets” contained in the Plan of Implementation (¶ 36).

Conclusion
The 1992 Earth Summit was a conceptual and political breakthrough because countries endorsed sustainable development for the first time. Essentially, sustainable development is economic and social development that protects and restores the environment, rather than degrades it. WSSD, by contrast, was about implementation, about taking the grand ideas and making them work in the real world. WSSD also emphasized poverty more than environment, but it did not treat them separately.

WSSD can be viewed as another step in the direction of sustainable development because it reaffirmed Agenda 21, because it added targets and timetables, and because it committed countries to a process for reviewing implementation of the commitments they made. While many hoped for more targets and timetables, some wondered whether the targets and timetables contained in the Plan of Implementation were too ambitious. Words like “success” and “failure” don’t capture the nuance or the incremental progress made in Johannesburg. Moreover, it is too early to judge WSSD in this manner; we will better evaluate the significance of this conference in five or ten years than we can now. It is actions, not words, that matter.

John Dernbach is a professor of Law at Widener University and the editor of Stumbling Toward Sustainability (Environmental Law Institute 2002). He is also a vice-chair of the Climate Change and Sustainable Development Committee. Comments or questions may be sent to john.c.dernbach@law.widener.edu.