S.Africa says Earth Summit 2 preparations on track

S.Africa says Earth Summit 2 preparations on track

Summit preparations

in S. Africa on track

Ed Stoddard
Reuters
Johannesburg, South Africa

South Africa's top environment official said on Tuesday he was
confident that preparatory talks for a global summit in
Johannesburg aimed at saving the environment and eradicating
poverty were on track.

"I am satisfied that progress has been made...on the general
outcome that we want at the Johannesburg summit," South African
Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Valli Moosa told a
business breakfast.

"What is still lacking is many of the details, and South
Africa will add what it can to those details," he said.

The European Union's green supremo, Environment Commissioner
Margot Wallstrom, said last week the conference could fail over
dithering unless preparatory talks were accelerated.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), a follow-
up to the 1992 Rio Earth summit, aims to hammer out a concrete
set of action plans to pull people out of poverty without
inflicting permanent damage on the environment.

It will be held from Aug. 26 to Sept. 4, with around 60,000
delegates including 100 heads of state, attending. The agenda is
to be finalized at a fourth round of preparatory talks in
Indonesia in late May and early June.

"I'm not over concerned (about the pace of the talks)," Moosa
said. "We're in April. If we had full agreement now, we wouldn't
need a conference."

The EU's Wallstrom said last week the summit needed to set
"realistic but ambitious targets", but she was not sure that
governments would agree on a detailed action plan.

Moosa said the summit would follow the path blazed by the
United Nations Millennium Declaration, which calls for, among
other things, a halving by 2015 of the proportion of people who
suffer from hunger or have no access to clean water.

"We want to translate the Millennium document into a plan of
action," he said. "We should aim to agree on a Johannesburg
program of action."

Priority areas will include improving water access and
quality, energy, health, education and food security.

A "progress report" will also be drawn up on the decade since
Rio. Moosa said that while a lot had been accomplished, there
were areas where there had been no progress.

He said there had been too much emphasis on the environmental
aspects of sustainable development and not enough on the economic
and social sides of the equation, which Johannesburg hopes to
rectify.

He also said the world's affluent nations had not spent as
much on development aid as they had committed themselves to at
Rio.