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1 Air
« Air pollution
has now become a major killer with three million people dying of
it every year.
«
Carbon emissions doubled in three decades. Global warming is now
a serious threat.
«
US carbon emissions are 16 per cent above 1990 levels making it
a major polluter.
2 Water
Forty per cent of world population now faces chronic shortage of
fresh water for daily needs.
«
Half the world's wetlands have been lost and one-fifth of the 10,000
freshwater species is extinct.
«
Contaminated water kills around 2.2 million people every year.
3 Land
« Since 1990,
2.4 per cent of the world's forests has been destroyed. The rate
of loss is now 90,000 sq km every year.
«
Now two-thirds of the world's farm lands suffer from soil degradation.
«
Half the world's grasslands are over-grazed. India is 25 per cent
short of its fodder needs.
4 Wildlife
« 800 species
have become extinct and 11,000 more are threatened.
«
Almost 75 per cent of the world's marine captures is overfished
or fully utilised. In North America, 10 fish species went extinct
in the 1990s.
«
Of the 9,946 known bird species, 70 per cent has declined in numbers.
5 People
« The world added
800 million people since 1990. In 2000, global population was 6
billion, up from 2.5 billion in 1950.
«
In 10 years, the world will have to feed and house another billion.
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When the
curtains came down on the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, the Worldwide
Fund for Nature sent up a giant balloon that had the words "Action
Not Hot Air". Ten years later, as the world begins another mammoth
summit on saving the earth's environment at Johannesburg, South Africa,
there has been very little action in cleaning up the mess. Instead, the
road to this week's World Summit on Sustainable Development is littered
with unkept promises and tattered treaties. There is hot air in plenty
partly because of global warming caused by the galloping increase in carbon
emissions by uncaring nations that has severely disrupted weather patterns
across the world.
The Johannesburg summit seems to be doomed even before it begins. "Nothing
much has happened after Rio to justify such a big event," says Ashok
Khosla, president of the Delhi-based Development Alternatives. Khosla,
who played a major role in the non-governmental movement at Rio in 1992,
has decided not to attend the summit. Wisely. For unlike Rio, where many
of the major issues were hammered out much in advance, most of the countries
remain clueless about the real aim of the 2002 summit. "It is turning
out to be a summit without substance," says Sunita Narain, director,
Centre for Science and Environment, who is part of India's official delegation
to Johannesburg.
The lack of a clear agenda was partly the reason why Indian Prime Minister
A.B. Vajpayee dropped out of the summit along with a host of other leaders.
But a major reason was the decision by the US President George Bush to
pull out of the summit and send the embattled Colin Powell, his sectary
of state, to represent him. America seemed to have an agenda of its own
as it unfurled what it called a "partnership initiative" that
threw most countries off balance. It essentially called for a host of
development projects funded by corporates to be routed largely through
NGOs in needy countries. The developing countries saw it as a ploy by
the US to bypass multilateral negotiations and renege on the firm commitments
it had made at Rio.
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From Rio to Johannesburg
The Slow Burnout
« While the 1992 Rio de Janeiro summit saw 130
heads of state present, the response to Johannesburg is lukewarm.
Less than 100 leaders will attend. Prominent absentees: the US president
and the Indian prime minister.
«
At Rio, developed countries agreed to spend 0.7 per cent of their
GNP towards development assistance. Instead of increasing, the figure
has come down from 0.34 per cent in 1992 to 0.22 per cent now.
«
Agenda 21, the blueprint for change agreed upon at Rio, was to be
like the Ten Commandments. But countries like the US want to renege
on key agreements, pushing the process back to square one.
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At the heart of the problem is, not surprisingly, money. The battle lines
between a group of recalcitrant North countries and the discontented South
nations were drawn at the various preparatory conferences leading up to
Johannesburg. In these, the JUSCAN (for Japan, the US, Canada, Australia
and New Zealand) group made every effort to whittle down the tremendous
gains made at Rio. Among them was Agenda 21, the blueprint for sustainable
development of the earth that had been agreed upon in the 1992 summit.
Its annual cost was estimated at $600 billion (Rs 28,80,000 crore). That
figure included $125 billion that the North was giving as development
assistance to poorer countries. Instead of increasing to meet the commitments,
in 2000 the assistance fell to
$53 billion.
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FASIAN BROWN CLOUD
The Haze Maze
Asia has never seen anything quite so scary.
According to the findings of a scientific panel constituted by the
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), a vast blanket of pollution,
3 km thick, has settled over south Asia and has become "a major
environmental hazard for the region". Caused largely by the
dramatic increase in the burning of fossil fuels in Asian countries
in the past decade, the haze is said to have a serious impact on
the continent's climate and weather patterns. Containing a mass
of ash, acids and aerosols, the haze is so thick that it blocks
the amount of sunlight hitting the earth by as much as 15 per cent.
Dubbed the Asian Brown Cloud (ABC) by the
scientists, it is said to have caused a reduction in rainfall by
20-40 per cent in northwest India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and western
China. Rainfall is affected because the aerosols and particles in
the haze cause drops to be smaller and more numerous resulting in
less precipitation from clouds. In India, the haze is estimated
to have affected winter rice harvests by 10 per cent. Worse, the
scientists see a direct correlation between the haze and the thousands
of premature deaths reported in these countries because of respiratory
diseases.
The threat is not restricted to Asian countries.
Klaus Toepfer, UNEP's executive director, who released the report
at a press conference in London last week, points out: "There
are global implications not least because a pollution parcel like
this can travel halfway round the globe in a week." The UNEP
scientific panel has now called for a separate project that will
establish observatories to study the haze and its impact on agriculture,
health and water.
In Delhi, however, instead of concern the
report elicited a great deal of scepticism in the Environment Ministry
circles. Although the UNEP's scientific panel had a couple of Indian
scientists, senior officials questioned the timing and the veracity
of the report. Coming a week before the Johannesburg summit, they
suspect that it will be used to pressure developing countries to
agree on sharing the burden of cleaning up the earth's environment.
Ever since Rio, developed countries have been
chafing at the various declarations that put the onus of controlling
the levels of pollution on them. The US turned its back on the agreement
to reduce the hazards of climate change because it argued that poor
nations which contributed substantially to the pollution load were
not given any reduction targets. At the summit, the ABC comes in
handy to hammer their grievance and hide their shortcomings.
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To make matters more diffused, key environment issues such as saving
forests and protecting biological diversity have been pushed to the background
at Johannesburg. Instead primacy is given to subjects such as health and
education. But since it is largely a gathering of environment ministers,
it is expected to produce more sound than substantive solutions. "The
greenness of the process is gone as individual environmental issues are
dealt with in separate agreements," says Deepa Wadhwa, joint secretary,
Ministry of External Affairs, who was closely involved in the negotiations
leading to the summit.
The progress of some of these environmental treaties has been dismal.
The US has derailed the global treaty on climate change by refusing to
comply with the agreement to keep its carbon emissions at 1990 levels.
The convention on conserving biological diversity has largely been a non-starter.
As a result, in the race between development and degradation there is
no doubt which is the loser (See chart).
The global compact agreed upon at Rio also seems to be unravelling.
While much of Europe willingly shouldered the responsibilities imposed
by the 1992 summit, the JUSCAN group felt it was hounded into making commitments
it wasn't keen to keep. The US was particularly resentful that the treaty
on climate change placed no responsibility on the developing countries
to clean up the mess although they contributed substantially to the world's
pollution levels. At Rio, the poorer countries had successfully argued
that overexploitation by the industrialised countries in the past century
was the main reason for the sorry state of the earth's atmosphere. Now
the US questions the basis of such an argument and has pulled out of the
climate change treaty altogether citing its unequal nature.
The Johannesburg jamboree was planned primarily as an implementation
summit. It was meant to be a stock- taking exercise of the progress since
Rio and also to set up concrete targets to be achieved by the next decade.
Now Rajeev Kher, joint secretary, Ministry of Environment, says, "
Many nations will be happy if the summit just reaffirms the principles
agreed upon at Rio." If you have tears then prepare to shed them
now.
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CURRENT
ISSUE JULY 29, 2002
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