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Johannesburg 2002: The opportunity and the risk
By Claude Martin*
Director-General of WWF International, based in Gland.
The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) (August/September 2002)
could make an important contribution to healing the divisions of the world and
alleviating the poverty that leads to so many of them. However such an outcome
is dependent on participants realising that it is both simplistic and
counterproductive to try and separate the economic and environmental components
of poverty.
Gland, Switzerland - We are only a little more than six months away from the
vast international gathering that has become known, among those of us involved
in such things, as Rio+10, otherwise the World Summit on Sustainable
Development, or WSSD. Our diaries are rapidly filling with meetings, discussion
groups and plenary sessions that will examine all aspects of sustainability, and
it seems that, once again, people are looking towards international summit
meetings to solve some of the world's worst problems. Well, we have been here
before, and the results that have flowed from such conferences have been, at
best, mixed.
Yet I cannot help thinking that the WSSD, perhaps more than any of its
predecessors, offers an opportunity to make a real difference to the way the
world works. The events of the past year, principally the destruction of the
World Trade Center in New York on September 11, and the subsequent blend of
conflict and reconstruction in Afghanistan that has followed it, have focused
many anxious minds on the underlying causes of the social tensions and the
glaring inequalities that destabilise our world. In that spirit, the summit in
Johannesburg would appear to be the ideal forum in which to analyse and reach an
understanding of the complex roots of social conflict and poverty - political
and demographic imbalances, market failures, inequitable access to resources,
and so on.
There has, too, been some evolution in the way the world approaches the
social and economic disparities that bring it so much grief. It is increasingly
being recognised that such problems are often linked in complicated ways to the
manner in which societies deal with their natural resources - forests, soils,
fresh water, seas - and to the impact on those resources of the globalised
economy. Intergovernmental organisations have at least begun to acknowledge the
central role that environmental assets play in sustaining the rural areas where
most of the world's poor people live.
This necessary change in attitude was neatly captured by the UN
Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, in his recent report on the implementation of
Agenda 21: 'Reducing poverty and improving opportunities for sustainable
livelihoods requires economic and social development, sustainable resource
management and environmental protection.'
If that were to be the guiding principle in the Johannesburg discussions,
then the WSSD really could make an important contribution to healing the
divisions of the world and alleviating the poverty that leads to so many of
them.
So the opportunity is there for us to grasp. At the same time, however, I
have noticed some risks emerging in the preparations for the WSSD. For example,
I am concerned that in the past few months we have been hearing voices that seem
to say: Let us first deal with poverty, and once that problem is solved we can
take care of the environment. There is, of course, merit in the first part of
that proposition, but, as WWF - the conservation organization - points out in
its recent publication, Poverty is not a number - The Environment is not a
butterfly** - it is both simplistic and counterproductive to try to separate the
economic and the environmental components of poverty.
The direct connection between the rural poor and the natural environment is
now well documented. In Zimbabwe, to take just one case, a detailed analysis of
the degree of dependence on environmental resources of farmers in communal areas
concluded that 'roughly 35 per cent of average total income came from
freely-provided environmental goods.' What this means is that free natural
resources, subsistence farming and income from the sale of environmental goods,
such as firewood and foodstuffs, provide millions of Zimbabweans with their
livelihoods.
Why, then, in the 2000/1 World Development Report of the World Bank is the
environment dealt with only in terms of the natural disasters that further
damage people already severely disadvantaged? Why is there no reference to the
economic importance of environmental assets, no discussion about alleviating
poverty by giving rural populations access to and control over those assets? The
Bank recognises that the true definition of poverty is a 'pronounced deprivation
in well-being', yet does not apparently notice the importance of environmental
resources in the provision of goods, assets, conditions and opportunities that
will alone remove such deprivation.
To be fair, we have come a long way in our understanding of poverty. We now
see that it arises from a social relationship of competition among individuals,
groups and the state in their pursuit of wealth and political power. But unless
we can go one step further, and realise that poverty cannot be eradicated by
simply increasing economic growth, trade, consumption and the exploitation of
resources, then the ideals we now hear being trumpeted will turn out to be
nothing more than rhetoric.
The path now being followed by governments and many international institutions,
in assuming that economic growth is the first priority, is actually leading away
from the alleviation of rural poverty and environmental degradation, which is
fundamental to addressing the inequality that is such a dangerous force in the
world. Unless the WSSD can change that direction, and promote the integrated
approach that the phrase sustainable development itself implies, it will add
little to the record of practical achievement by international conferences.
*Dr Claude Martin is Director-General of WWF International, based in Gland.
**WWF-Macroeconomics Program, 2000. Poverty is not a number - The environment
is not a butterfly, by David Reed. 15pp.
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