What a difference can Rio+10 make

By Ms Regina Scharf, Galileu magazine

The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Award 2002, Regional Winner: Latin America

Four specialists make their forecasts of the world's environment destiny after the meeting that starts next August 26, in Johannesburg, South Africa

Stopping Extinction

Most Brazilian genetic patrimony may be saved, even if the rhythm of the Amazon destruction grew all along the last decade. Even if 11,000 species of plants and animals endure high risk of disappearing from the planet. Paulo Nogueira-Neto, president of Fundação Florestal, in São Paulo, strongly believes in that. He says: 'if we face Johannesburg with excessive confidence, we will be naïf. But if we don't have at least some optimism, no progress can be expected'.

This is not John Doe's opinion. Among the most respected Brazilian environmentalists, Nogueira-Neto was the first national secretary of Environment, for a 12-year-period, till 1986. He is also one of the fathers of the sustainable development concept, based in the triple bottom line of economical viability, social justice and environmental correctness. In the eighties, he worked for the notorious Brundtland Commission, created by the United Nations to define planetary strategies on the long term.

But it is his present work, at the University of São Paulo, on small populations genetics, that gives him such hope in the survival capacity of species. 'Take the hamsters as an example', says the professor. 'All of them descend from a unique pregnant female, captured in the Syrian desert.' The North American bison has a similar story. Its populations grew from 23 specimens that survived in the Rocky Mountains. Today they are thousands'.

According to Nogueira-Neto, the same human intervention that helped hamsters and bisons to grow and multiply is essential to ecosystems conservation. ' We must plant the riversides - to help connecting isolated forest fragments - improve conservation units control and remove taxes imposed on those who strive to maintain the forest. We must show that, in many cases, knocking the native vegetation down is simply not worth from an economic point of view.'

Such initiatives had good results in Rio Grande do Sul state. A recent inventory of the local forests made by local government and the Federal University of Santa Maria realized that the forests' extension almost tripled since 1983. This study associates regeneration to the fact that some areas difficult to cultivate were despised, thanks to tougher laws and a bigger awareness of the landowners.

To help degraded areas recover their former magnificence, the researcher suggested that Brazilian government should propose, in Johannesburg, the establishment of a worldwide network to protect those areas. ' While the untouched woods offer a steady carbon balance, the secondary forests can grow up and remove that gas from the atmosphere and so reduce global heating ', he explains. Only in the Amazon, there are 165,000 square kilometres of deforested and abandoned areas - a surface comparable to Acre state.


Saving the forest fragments

Another beneficial form of human intervention, emphasizes Paulo Nogueira-Neto, is the creation of conservation units. In Brazil, the officially protected area more than doubled in the last decade. The global growth maintained a similar rhythm. According to the World Commission of Protected Areas, they rose from 7,35 million to 13,2 million squared kilometres since 1990, scattered between 30,000 parks and reserves. It is true that many of these units were not effectively created, basically due to the huge amounts of money needed to control those areas and remove local populations. The increasing use of the environmental compensations system - a tax retained on major engineering works, around 0.5% of their total value, used to compensate their negative impacts and thus transferred to the closest conservation units - has helped to protect these areas. The new thermal power plants from Rio Grande do Sul are a good example, says the professor. The taxes paid by the entrepreneurs allowed the dispossession of National Park of São Joaquim's 30,000 hectares - the only region in Brazil where it snows - so that it could truly exist.
Nogueira-Neto also bets that an attitude change might guarantee success, in addition to official instruments, such as the Convention of the Biological Diversity, which imposes to each country the protection of its species, through the conservation of their habitats. Launched in the Earth Summit, in 1992, it entered into force less than two years later, thanks to the support of 183 nations. Brazil was the first one to sign it after the National Congress approval in February 1994. The document never obtained American support. Nogueira-Neto says what really matters is people's evolution. 'The Earth Summit generated in the population the desire to preserve its natural wealth ', says. 'Therefore, they will not only survive - but even prosper.'


The Carbon War

The Kyoto Protocol will succeed and the Earth heating rhythm will freeze. This will happen even if the US insist in keeping out of this game - despite their responsibility for one fourth of all the world carbon emissions, which form a gas layer in the atmosphere that doesn't allow heat to escape. This is the forecast made by Fabio Feldmann, executive secretary of the Brazilian Forum on Climate Changes. ' If Russia and Poland sign the Protocol - and I think this will happen soon - the document will enter into force even without the USA ', says Feldmann, that also coordinates Brazilian preparation for Rio+10. If this to happen, environmentalists will obtain an important victory, in Johannesburg, in one of the fiercest wars in modern diplomacy.

The Kyoto Protocol was launched in 1997, once there was evidence that practically no industrialized country had fulfilled the commitments established by the Convention on Climate Change: to control their emissions of carbon dioxide, ozone and nitrogen oxides, amongst others. These gases are produced mainly by modern activities -vehicles, industries and even cattle, which eliminates methane while ruminating. But, to enter into force, 55 countries must ratify the Protocol, including those responsible for, at the very least, 55% of the global emissions. And, till now, the USA refuses to sign it. There are, by now, very clear evidences that the world climate is changing. The 90's were the hottest years since temperature monitoring started, in 19th century. The 2,500 scientists work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have calculated that the temperature will still grow some 3 ºC more this century.

Some consequences of the heating are already visible. Munich Re, a German reinsurance company that systematically reviews indemnities paid for catastrophes associated with the climate, as tornados and sea-quakes, realized that, in the 90's, those phenomena caused expenses around US$ 608 billion worldwide - three fold the indemnities paid in the 80's. Moreover, the oceans' level rose from 10 to 20 centimetres since 1900. And tropical diseases linked to temperature, as malaria and yellow fever, have been occurring in regions where they were not registered previously.

Clean development

According to Feldmann, Americans have given hints that, during Rio+10, they intend to challenge principles established in Rio-92, as of the principle of common but differentiated responsibility: those who have polluted for a longer period have to make an extra effort. And the USA accepted this principle, says Feldmann, in 1992, when they signed the Convention on Climate Change, along with 164 other countries. Now, the American diplomats are demanding, for instance, that poor countries with significant economies, such as Brazil, China or India, also assume concrete goals of reduction. Since the beginning of the 90's, the United States broadened their carbon emissions in 18%, reaching 1.57 billion tons per year. 'President George W. Bush faces this question only from a domestic point of view', says Feldmann. ' If this standard is reproduced by the rest of the world, there is no possibility of global agreement.'

Not that the protocol, the way it is, might save the planet. ' Even if it defines these very clear goals, they are insufficient ', evaluates Feldmann. In 1990, the IPCC calculated that it would be necessary to cut 60% of the pollutant emissions to revert global heating. However, the Kyoto Protocol orders industrialized countries to cut an average of 5.2% of their emissions, comparing to 1990 levels, all along next ten years. These goals will become, certainly, tougher during the next decade, he says. ' When the climate changes starts to be more evident, public opinion's pressure will be enormous '. Brazil, like other developing countries, must make efforts so that its emissions stop growing up and must also produce an inventory of its emissions, which government intends to publish, with considerable delay, still before the Johannesburg meeting. This document will show that we are among the ten countries that emit more carbon, due to the Amazon deforestation. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), one of the main instruments of the Kyoto Protocol, allows companies and rich countries which were unable to reduce their emissions to the established goals sponsor forestry projects or the adoption of cleaner energies in developing countries. In exchange, the sponsor receives credits that can be traded as stock options. 'The CDM is a very creative instrument that allows migration of financial resources from the North to the South, in a way that might be beneficial to all ', says Feldmann. An instrument that, in the best scenario, could flood the Third World with US$ 30 billion in the next years.


Total Failure


Main complaints that will be herd in Johanesburg will certainly refer to the lack of financing for environmental projects. This is the forecast of Hélcio Marcelo de Souza, expert in Public Policies from the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies (Inesc), an NGO specialized in monitoring how governments manage their budgets. Many global financial mechanisms for sustainable development proposed during the Earth Summit never took off or remain far insufficient, according to Souza. ' Only 0.9% of all the resources spent by the Environment Ministry last year were offered by international sources ', he calculates. The reasons that explain this failure are several. Part of the responsibility lies on developed countries, which reduced their donations despite the promises made in Rio, when they agreed to be more generous. In 1992, the so-called Official Development Aid (ODA)- that is, the donations rich countries offer the poor countries - was around US$ 69 billion, which represents, in average, 0.33% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of donor countries. During ECO-92, they committed to raise this aid to 0.7% of their GDPs. Since then, they acted in the opposite way, reducing even more this share. In 2000, ODA fell to US$ 53 billion, or 0.22% of the rich countries GDP. The US, for instance, sets aside only 0.10% of its wealth for its poorer cousins.

During the Earth Summit, the developed countries also promised to load the Global Environment Facility (GEF) - a fund conceived to finance projects in poor countries that might have a global positive impact. This money is managed by the World Bank and offered to initiatives that aim to reduce climate change, ocean pollution, the ozone layer depletion and the loss of forests and biodiversity. In its first decade, GEF distributed US$ 4,2 billion. It is not much, considering that the adoption of sustainable development by poor countries might cost US$ 600 billion per year, as it was estimated during the Earth Summit - including US$ 125 billion that should have been donated by developed countries. Thus, GEF's help was 30 times smaller than the amount effectively needed.

No counterpart

There are other explanations for the lack of money for the environmental agenda. According to Souza, the World Bank, a traditionally huge dispenser of financial resources to environment projects, decided to offer only technical help and advisory services, instead of money. Besides, since 1999, when official expenses had to shrink, the Brazilian government stopped offering its counterpart. Without this contribution, the foreign investments started to vanish, say the expert.

Along the last decade, no environmental project received more external aid in the country than the Pilot Program for the Protection of Tropical Forests in Brazil (PPG-7), considered the greater in its sort in the world. It has been just incorporated to federal policies in a permanent basis. Launched in Rio-92, it took off only by 1995, with a US$ 280 million budget. A significant part of these resources was sent to parks and other conservation units in the Amazon and to forest resources management projects. However, according to Hélcio de Souza, the increase of external donations is not enough to guarantee an effective environmental preservation. In his opinion, when the government decides to focus its economy in foreign commercial interests, it prevents sustainable development's expansion. 'The decision of stimulating soy beans exports - and thus expand the plantations in the Amazon - is a good example of this', says the Inesc's expert.

In his evaluation, one of the hottest debates in the Johannesburg summit will be, precisely, on international trade and the foreign debt of developing countries. According to him, the sum of both internal and external debts interests paid in the last four-year-mandate of president Cardoso reach R$ 400 billion - the equivalent of a whole year of public budget. 'In consequence, he says, very little money remains in the country to promote projects that are fundamental in the environmental domain'.


The Planet Which Lost its Track


The day public administrators consider environment factors before making decisions is still far away, both in Brazil and abroad, despite all recommendations made by the Agenda 21. That is the evaluation of Pedro Jacobi, president of the Graduate Program of Environmental Sciences of the University of São Paulo, who worked in the making of the Brazilian Agenda 21.

This subject will be one of the main themes discussed in Johannesburg, since the conference is supposed to evaluate if Agenda 21 - probably the main international commitment born in the Earth Summit - was effectively adopted. This document is a sort of conduct code that each city, state or country should produce, to serve as a guide in public administration in order to promote sustainable development. According to the United Nations, over 6,000 cities are concluding their Agendas 21, and at least 80 countries keep sustainable development councils in charge of producing the national version of this document.

The process itself started to take off consistently in the last four years. In 1997, only 1,800 cities were involved in this effort. Brazil just concluded its own document, whose production listened to 40,000 people, who presented 6,000 proposals in several public audiences. The result was a volume with hundreds of pages, presented to president Cardoso last June. The local and state documents are also burning new. From Petrolina, in the Northeast region, to Campo Grande, right in the middle of Brazil, at least three-dozen initiatives are under discussion.
Agenda 21 discusses from the population growth and social inequalities to de environment impacts of transportation, electric generation, agriculture and industrialization. ' There is a crazy amount of information taken into consideration ', explains Jacobi. ' It is so ambitious that it risks to fail'. He compares this document to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - but in a longer and more complex version. 'Agenda 21 has a symbolic importance. But it must include environmental education and society mobilization. Otherwise, it will be only a bureaucratic device ', says.

Less than 1 dollar per day

Jacobi pays his tribute to documents produced by the city of Rio and the Ribeira Valley region, in the south of São Paulo state. On the other hand, he considers the Agenda 21 produced in the city of São Paulo quite frustrating, because it was not sufficiently discussed with citizens. 'Anyway, it is even more important to have consistent sustainable development programs, such as those adopted by Amapá state or the city of Ribeirão Pires, in the Greater São Paulo area, whose territory is 100% inside a protected area', he evaluates. In those cases, having a formal Agenda 21 turned out to be of lesser importance.

Jacobi notes, though, that these efforts are exceptions; public administrations normally don't incorporate the environmental vision. 'The economic aspects always prevail and environment continues to be seen as a minor and futile question', he says. That is why governments frequently opt to react after damage already happened - cleaning rivers or the soil - instead of investing in impact reduction.
Worldwide indicators prove that the management of the planet continues so problematic as much as by the time of Rio-92. Then, the 1% richest Brazilians had 13% of the overall national income. This did not change. In a global level, poverty also persists. Today, 1,2 billion of people live with less than one dollar per day. It is practically the same amount registered one decade ago. In this period, 800 million babies were born to the planet.

The good news is that they will have a better scholarity and life expectancy than their parents. In the beginning of the 90's, life expectancy of an average Brazilian was of 65,75 years. Today, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), we live, in average, 68,8 years. Moreover, in the same period, the number of children that die in their first years in the country fell from 44 to 34 in thousand new-borns.

According to Jacobi, hope lays in a solid Agenda 21 solids and in a stronger participation of civil society. 'We have never had so many NGOs networks putting pressure on the public policies and articulating the resistance against inadequate government actions', he says. The professor mentions networks that advocate in favour of the Amazon, the Atlantic Rainforest and the savannas or against big hydropower plants. Most of them not even existed one decade ago. To Jacobi, little by little, that is how the world administrators' attitude will finally change.


The Path that Led to the Conference


The Earth Summit, as Eco-92 is also known, was the biggest meeting of heads of State and government in History. From the Cuban Fidel Castro and George Bush, father of the current American president, who refused to sign the Convention of Biological Diversity, alleging that he could not allow 'environmental extremism to harm the United States'. ' Beyond the 108 presidents and prime ministers, the Earth Summit joined more than 20,000 members of civil society, in a parallel event. Environmentalists, religious and minorities leaderships and social activists promoted their own debates and produced several unofficial documents. Their motto: 'think globally, act locally '. At least 9,000 journalists from all around the planet witnessed two weeks of discussions and the birth of three documents that became the main environmental references in the following years: the conventions of Biological Diversity and Climate Change and Agenda 21.


Y2K as a goal

Despite its importance, the Earth Summit was not the true beginning of the international effort to guarantee the planet's future. The first big conference organized by the United Nations to discuss conflicts between environment and development occurred 20 years earlier, in Stockholm. One of the main products of that meeting was the creation of the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development, led by Gro Harlem Brundtland, then prime minister of Norway and presently director-general of the World Heath Organization. The commission published, in 1987, the report Our Common Future, that it considered environmental strategies in the long run to 'reach a sustainable development by the year 2000 and further'.

Johannesburg shall restart some discussions that were launched in Stockholm and search forms to implement the conventions born in Rio. ' We have to establish concrete goals and define financial sources so that the meeting doesn't convert into Rio-less-20 ', says Fabio Feldmann, who coordinates the federal government efforts towards the conference. In his opinion, the meeting shouldn't be excessively focused in African problems and poverty, as it seems to be the tendency. This was an effective risk, reduced when Latin American launched an initiative that represents the subcontinent view, according to Feldmann. ' Latin America's example inspired East Europe and Asia, that also presented their own documents, changing the focus of this discussion.'

A part from catching up themes from the previous conferences, Rio+10 must introduce some new discussions. One of them is global governance - the capacity of integrating global subjects into national and local policies. 'It is hard for parliaments to understand climate change or biodiversity loss, for instance ', Feldmann says. In his opinion, another important subject in the conference will be multilateralism - that is, the distribution of the global power, which is very concentrated in the United States nowadays. ' If the Rio+10 summit fails, this might be the end of the great international conferences cycle, making clear the United Nations difficulties to act ', he says. 'The very role of the UN will be a matter for debate.'