Toward a Bali Commitment?

Toward a Bali Commitment?

Negotiations have been going on for more than a week at Nusa
Dua, Bali, but delegates are still undecided on the formulation
of what is known as the Bali Commitment, which is expected to be
signed by heads of states at the upcoming World Summit on
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, in
September.

Currently convened in Bali are senior government officials and
business representatives attending the Fourth Preparatory
Committee for the World Summit, who will be joined in a few days
by government ministers. At stake is what is called the
Chairman's Text, an action plan that is supposed to substantiate
the global agreement reached at the Earth Summit in Rio de
Janeiro in 1992.

The reason for this concern is clear: The last decade has
proved that the Rio political and conceptual commitment has not
been decisive enough. A huge gap still separates the goals and
promises set out in Rio from what has actually been happening,
both in the rich and poor countries of the world. While the
Chairman's Text has become extensively expanded from the original
10-page document prepared by Prof. Emil Salim, it has become
neither more focused nor decisive.

The whole issue started from a historic report called Our
Common Future, which was presented more than 15 years ago by the
World Commission on Environment and Development at the United
Nations General Assembly. The document calls for a fundamental
reordering of global priorities and illustrates the links that
inescapably exist between environmental, economic and social
concerns. The conclusion is that sustainable development should
be established as the central organizing principle for societies
around the world.

The UN Conference on Environment and Development, called the
Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, made a breakthrough
and endorsed the principle. The favored development model for the
twentieth century was found to be unsustainable. The world can
not survive with a development model that is material-intensive,
driven by non-renewable fossil fuels, based on mass consumption
and mass disposal, and oriented primarily toward economic growth.
That model disregards people's needs, does not preserve the
natural environment for future generations, and does not respect
universal principles of human rights.

As was put forward by UN Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan,
governments from around the world that gathered at the Rio Earth
Summit recognized the great wisdom of the findings contained in
Our Common Future. More important, they committed themselves to
the unprecedented global effort of freeing our children and
grandchildren from the dangers of living on a planet whose
ecosystems and resources can no longer provide for their needs.

Ten years have since passed. However, unsustainable approaches
to economic progress remain pervasive. The global response to
environmental degradation is sluggish, as has been proven by
nearly every global environmental indicator. For instance,
despite growing evidence of a human-generated climate disruption,
global carbon dioxide emissions have increased by more than 9
percent over the decade, with the United States contributing more
than most to this increase, in addition to its disappointing
refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol on reducing global carbon
dioxide emissions.

Water scarcity is another good example. More than a billion
people in the world lack safe potable water and nearly three
billion do not have access to adequate sanitation. About half the
people in the developing world suffer from diseases caused by
contaminated water or food. An estimated 14,000 to 30,000 people
die each day from water-related diseases -- the equivalent of
several Sept. 11 tragedies every day, year in year out.

Deforestation is another huge problem. The world continues to
lose forested areas with the Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) citing a global loss of 2.2 percent over the last decade.
Meanwhile, more than 1.7 billion people in 40 nations live in
areas with critically low levels of forest cover, even though
they must rely on forests for firewood, timber and other goods
and services. The impact of deforestation is most devastating to
the poor. In short, many tenets of sustainable development have
not been addressed adequately over the last 10 years. It seems
that business is still as usual. It has not changed substantially
after the Rio Earth Summit.

The conclusion that can be drawn from all this is that the
Chairman's Text must formulate an action plan, focusing on
specific strategies and schedules to change that dangerous trend.
After all, the 1992 Rio Declaration asserts that human beings are
at the center of sustainable development concerns. The thousands
of government officials, business representatives and NGO
activists now gathered in Bali should keep that in mind. They are
not all adversaries. They should join hands to initiate
sustainable development. Or they might just as well forget the
Johannesburg summit.