Johannesburg – credible and ambitious follow-up is needed

Johannesburg – credible and ambitious follow-up is needed

Stephan Singer from WWF, argues that in spite of some positive efforts by the European Union and its member states, the outcome of the Johannesburg Summit was disappointing.

From the perspective of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the outcome of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg was disappointing in many ways. In spite of some efforts by the European Union and its Member States, the poor results can not only be blamed on the United States and OPEC. They are also a reflection of dire weaknesses in the performance of the EU, for instance regarding early strategy development, alliance building and tactics deployed towards reaching targets. It became very obvious in the negotiations that the EU was internally paralysed between those Member States that formed the majority of conservative-led governments such as Italy, France, Denmark, The Netherlands, Spain and those still having social democratic-led governments such as Germany, the United Kingdom and Belgium.

Too often, the EU’s potential alliance building capacity is limited by its own stumbling and time-consuming internal negotiations. And there is a price to pay for it. For most issues, the EU was not the most vocal and leading block in efforts to achieve sustainable development. In the case of clean renewable energies for instance, Brazil together with some other Latin American countries and Norway took the lead. But they were overcome by a catastrophic mixture of fundamental opposition to any targets and timetables by the US, Australia, Japan and OPEC as well as by an EU policy that could not support the exclusion of large dams and unsustainable biomass as proposed by Brazil. In the end there was no target at all for clean energy.

Transboundary and integrated river management, essential for sharing life-sustaining freshwater availability among all communities, was already ‘lost’ in a preparatory meeting in Bali earlier this year. Without the interventions of Tuvalu and Ethiopia (!) in the last minutes of Johannesburg, the still undecided impacts of WTO rules on the effectiveness of Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEA) in times of conflict, could have been worsened.

If the EU fails to lead, who will?

However, the present and enlarged EU will have to play a key role in the field of internal and external Sustainable Development in the future. It is simply not enough for the EU to perform better than the US in international negotiations. Too often that has been a cheap excuse and led the US and its allies to find common ground in the United Nations on a rather low level. The EU must aim at the ceiling and not at the floor if Europe is serious about helping to create a world based on justice, equity, peace and partnership.

To assume that equitable agreements with the Bush administration would be reached at the Johannesburg summit or in the coming years, was and is at best naive. The US government fundamentally rejects any binding targets, timetables or any multilateral framework to which they have to comply, such as the Kyoto climate protection treaty, the International Court of Justice, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, domestic steel subsidies and the like. It is therefore paramount for the (enlarged) EU to develop long-term strategies for sustainable development – with or without the US – together with like-minded countries in the developing world but also with non-EU OECD nations and Russia. Who, if not the EU, can play this role?

On the earlier occasion of the Kyoto treaty, with splendid diplomacy and strategy under the leadership of Commission and the then two presidencies Sweden and Belgium, the EU has shown that early international alliance building against the US can work. After President Bush abandoned the Kyoto treaty early in 2001, the EU devoted t he entire year to fostering global support for ratification of the treaty. And this was extremely difficult given the economic importance of the US and its high level of emissions.

Therefore it is now imperative that the EU engages in establishing a credible and ambitious Johannesburg follow-up process both for its own action and for global action in implementing strategies and policies that go well beyond the compromises reached in South Africa.

That strategy must be nourished with lasting structures in the EU that survive short-term governmental changes. It is thus paramount that the Council agrees to establish Sustainable Development as a key objective for all External and Foreign Policies of all present and future Member States and immediately implement due structures in their own foreign policy ministries. Sustainable Development is not an issue for less powerful environmental and development ministers alone.

What the EU can do

In order to learn the lessons, WWF urges the EU to undertake the following steps:

Undertake a thorough analysisof the strengths and weaknesses of the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation in order to propose to the European Council in March 2003 a comprehensive follow-up plan for the EU, to be part of the implementation of the European Sustainable Development Strategy, both internal and external.

Further develop the EU Water Initiativeto ensure that it fully engages African and NIS governments and all relevant stakeholders. The initiative must adopt an integrated approach to water management, complementing its focus on the provision of clean water and sanitation with the equally important need to manage the water resources sustainably so they can continue to provide necessary water supply. The initiative must therefore have a clear focus on integrated river basin management and transboundary co-operation.

Given the fact that regions of the world suffering from water scarcity can only provide the poor with access to water and sustain the environment by using their limited water supplies more efficiently, the Initiative must also deal with the issue of efficiency of water use. For instance, irrigation and urban water supply systems can easily be made much more efficient. In that respect WWF strongly cautions against any attempts by private companies to hijack this valid Initiative for furthering the privatisation of public goods such as freshwater. Liberalisation of markets for public goods, such as water, does not work in poor environments with lack of infra-structural frameworks that guarantee citizens right of access to these life-sustaining products.

Further develop the EU Energy InitiativeInitiative in a credible and transparent way with the inclusion of all stakeholders. In addition any EU Energy Initiative in the context of Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication must focus on the various aspects of providing energy to those urban and rural poor communities in developing countries that have no or erratic access to energy services. In order to garner support from broad sectors of the society, the technological focus shall be on all forms of improvements of energy efficiency, clean and new renewable energy sources (new renewable energy excludes large hydro units – more than10 MW – and unsustainable biomass). A particular focus in that Initiative should be on improving conditions in a sustainable way for those communities that rely on biomass, mainly fuel wood and dung for cooking and heating.

In that respect the EU should further develop the “coalition of the willing” to promote clean and renewable energies on the basis of targets and timetables. To that regard WWF still supports the ambitious but realistic initiative by Brazil for a target of 10% new renewable energies globally in the next decade. The Commission and Member States should study carefully the very promising R enewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) introduced by the UK government in Johannesburg and open to all stakeholders in the field of energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Clarification is needed of the relationshipbetween MEAs (such as the Kyoto Protocol) and the WTO rules. Although aspects of this relationship will be discussed under the current WTO negotiations, the most important dimensions lie outside the mandate of the WTO Doha Declaration. In particular, the WTO negotiations will do nothing to address the issue of disputes brought to the WTO by non-Parties to MEAs, although this is the scenario which is most likely to be encountered in practice.

The WTO mandate must not be broadened in such a way to allow these issues to be addressed through the WTO negotiations – risking leaving MEA floundering under WTO oversight. The WTO is not an environmental policy making body, and is the wrong forum for deciding upon such relationships. However, as the main demandeur of negotiations on the WTO-MEA relationship at Doha, the Commission and Member States must now propose concrete suggestions as to how these issues – which were left unresolved by the Johannesburg process – can now be addressed.

The Council and Member States should increase and adapt financial supportto the sustainable management of natural resources in EU partner developing countries in order to substantially contribute to poverty alleviation and to meet the Millennium Development Goals, which were clearly confirmed by the Johannesburg Summit. In addition, EU Member States must live up to their promises from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio to provide 0.7% of their GDP to foreign assistance, poverty alleviation and sustainable development.

A reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP)is badly needed living up to the clear decision in Johannesburg to “eliminate subsidies that contribute to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and to over-capacity”.

An environmentally and socially convincing reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)and its subsidies, as envisaged for 2006 by the EU, is needed as well in order to allow for non-discriminatory trade of agricultural products from developing countries and in order to eliminate unsustainable farming and export practices by the EU.

The EU must embark on a Chemicals Policythat makes the EU the global leader in implementing the decision from Johannesburg to “achieve by 2020 that chemicals are used and produced in ways that lead to minimization of significant adverse effects on human health and the environment”. With the ongoing review of the Member States Chemical Policy, the EU is in the best position to do that by phasing out all those persistent substances that accumulate in humans and ecosystems and/or contribute to environmental damage such as endocryne and hormone system disruptors.

Politics of the G77

Finally, from WWF’s view, if the EU is deemed to be successful by building a comprehensive strategy to create future long-term alliances with key developing countries, the concept and politics of the G77, the group of more than 150 developing countries, must be seriously questioned. G77 encompasses extremely diverse countries displaying many more differences regarding wealth, culture, economic and environmental interests than the industrialised nations. And that is reflected by much of G77’s environmental policy.

Very often, the lowest common denominator determines the group’s positions. For instance, as long as countries threatened by climate change and rising sea levels such as poor drought-stricken African countries and Small Island Nations (AOSIS) are in the same block as rich oil-exporting nations such as Saudi-Arabia and Kuwait, unbearable compromises are unavoidable. For the EU, conducting a reliable and credible sustainable development policy with poor nation s and setting global policy frameworks with the G77 while the OPEC countries are on board, remains tough. Therefore, the EU’s sustainable development policy with poor developing nations must embrace components to isolate the government of the wealthy oil nations.

Stephan Singer is Head of the European Climate and Energy Policy Unit, WWF European Policy Office, Brussels.

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