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.