Ten-Year Anniversary of Earth Summit: Johannesburg in 2002

John Dernbach

In 1992, in Rio de Janeiro, more than 140 heads of state participated in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, or Earth Summit). They agreed to implement, in their own countries, a plan of action for sustainable development called Agenda 21. They also agreed to a set of 27 principles known as the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. Two treaties were also opened for signature – the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Sustainable development was necessary, they said, to fight two severe and growing problems – the absolute number of people in poverty and the deteriorating condition of the world’s environment. Those two objectives, which are stated throughout Agenda 21, provide a way of understanding what sustainable development means; sustainable development occurs when the ordinary effects of human activity protect and restore the environment and help eliminate widespread poverty.

Agenda 21, which is several hundred pages no matter how it is printed, contains a detailed set of objectives and actions for a wide variety of social, economic, and environmental subjects. These subjects include poverty, consumption patterns, deforestation, oceans, and toxic chemicals. It also describes in detail the role that nine major groups should play in achieving sustainable development (including women, business and industry, and nongovernmental organizations). Because implementation matters, it contains a detailed program for, among other things, providing financial and technical resources to countries that need them for capacity building and for better information for decision making.

Agenda 21 also established a Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) within the U.N. system to monitor implementation. Agenda 21 emphasizes the role of national governments in implementation, stating that they should "ensure socially responsible economic development while protecting the resource base and the environment for the benefit of future generations" (Agenda 21 par. 8.7). The centrality of Agenda 21 to sustainable development is suggested by the only document that came out of the U.N. General Assembly's Rio+5 review in 1997– a Programme for the Further Implementation of Agenda 21.

The principles in the Rio Declaration include the precautionary approach, the polluter-pays principle, integrated decision making, intergenerational equity, and developed country leadership. These principles are woven into the fabric of Agenda 21, but they have also provided much of the intellectual foundation for a variety of conventions and protocols that have been negotiated since Rio – the Desertification Convention, the Straddling Fish Stocks Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, and the recent Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.

Johannesburg
A World Summit on Sustainable Development marking the ten-year anniversary of the Earth Summit will be held in 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa. The exact dates for the Johannesburg Summit have apparently not yet been set, although knowledgeable observers believe it will be in September 2002.

This conference will assess international progress made in implementing Agenda 21. Although the Summit will also identify next steps needed for sustainable development, the U.N. General Assembly has decided that Agenda 21 will not be renegotiated.

Rather, the U.N. General Assembly intends the Summit to "reinvigorate, at the highest political level, the global commitment to a North/South partnership" for the "accelerated implementation of Agenda 21 and the promotion of sustainable development." The decision to encourage political support for sustainable development is underscored by the meeting’s status as a summit conference to which heads of state will be invited. Among other things, the Summit will feature a high-level dialogue in which, the CSD says, national governments and major groups can "share their specific sustainable development commitments for the next phase."

Preparatory Process
Preparatory meetings (or PrepComms) will be held at both the regional and global level. North America and Europe have been included in one region. The PrepComm for this region will be convened as a Special Session of the Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva, September 24-25, 2001. This Meeting will include a ministerial roundtable and a multistakeholder dialogue in which NGOs and members of civil society participate.

The first global PrepComm has already been held in early May 2001, at the end of the annual CSD meeting, and was primarily organizational. The first substantive global PrepComm is tentatively scheduled for January 2002 in New York, and will involve a global review of substantive progress. Another PrepComm will be held in New York in March 2002, if necessary, to finish this review.

The penultimate PrepComm is scheduled for May 2002 in Indonesia. According to the U.N., the "focus at this stage is expected to be on identifying and building consensus on future priorities and strategies for the next 5 to 10 years."

National Assessments
CSD is calling on each national government to "identify 3-5 achievable progress targets that the country can commit to achieving in the next 5-10 years." The idea is for each country to identify "its own targets based on its own priorities and capabilities."

In the United States, the Environmental Law Institute will publish a book in 2002 assessing U.S. progress on sustainable development and will make recommendations. I am editing the book, and it will include contributions by some three dozen experts from universities, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector.

As ELI’s involvement indicates, sustainable development could have significant consequences for U.S. law. In 1993, for instance, ELI published a treatise entitled Environmental Law from Resources to Recovery, which systematically examines the environmental laws relating to specific economic sectors from extraction or harvesting of resources to their ultimate disposal or recovery. Because sustainable development requires an integrated approach to production, the treatise suggests some basic changes in law.

Relation to Climate Change
The Johannesburg Summit is giving impetus to efforts to move toward sustainable development in specific contexts. European Union (EU) leaders hope to have the EU ratify the Kyoto Protocol by September 2002 to coincide with the Rio+10 Summit. Obviously, EU ratification of the Protocol would be a significant step toward its implementation. The next scheduled meeting of the conference of the parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change is Bonn in July 2001. EU negotiators are intensifying their work so that the results of the Bonn meeting will lead to a Protocol that can be ratified in time for Johannesburg.

For more information, the official U.N. website for the Summit is http://www.un.org/rio+10.

John Dernbach is associate professor of Law at Widener University School of Law, vice-chair with the Section’s Climate Change and Sustainable Development Committee, and a visiting scholar at the Environmental Law Institute.