Roundup: World Leaders Aim High at Earth Summit

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, August 12, 2002

Roundup: World Leaders Aim High at Earth Summit

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With only two weeks to the second Earth Summit in South Africa's Johannesburg, leaders from both developing and developed countries have voiced high expectation for the event, hoping that the summit will map a way forward for a planet battered by poverty, diseases and depletion of natural resources.

"The Johannesburg summit offers a great opportunity to give new energy to international cooperation and to strengthen global solidarity," says Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson in an article contained in a special edition of Our Planet magazine published Monday by the UN Environment Program (UNEP).

"It is an opportunity to make real progress in achieving the goals set out in Rio ten years ago. It is an opportunity that we are not allowed to miss," he notes.

The summit, known as World Summit on Sustainable Development, is a follow-up to the first Earth Summit in Brazil's Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It is scheduled to open on Aug. 26 and end on Sept. 4.

During the meeting, some 60,000 delegates including over 100 heads of state and government will examine the progress the world has made in sustainable development over the past ten years and are expected to endorse action plans on water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity.

"The world has changed since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, but unfortunately, in many respects, not for the better," Brazilian President Fernado Henrique argues in the magazine.

He cites global environmental degradation, unchanged pattern of production and consumption in the developed world and the reluctance of developed countries to transfer clean technologies to developing countries among others.

The president also pointed to the fact that the Kyoto Protocol which aims at curbing greenhouse gas emissions to check the trend of global warming has not been ratified by chief polluters of the world.

"Africa, a continent dear to us all, symbolizes how much people can suffer because the world has failed to find an alternative way of achieving development," he says, stressing that the Johannesburg summit must launch innovative initiatives for sustainable development.

"We need to promote the sustainable use of water, to find new sources of renewable energy, and to clarify the link between poverty and the depletion of natural resources," the president notes.

In his article, Thabo Mbeki, president of South Africa, flags up the need to address the world's existing patterns of production and consumption.

A global consensus has been established that sustainable development rests on three interdependent pillars: the protection of the earth, social development and economic prosperity.

The period since the Rio Earth Summit has been one of unprecedented global economic growth. Growth in the world economy in the year 2000 alone exceeded that during the entire 19th century.

"Yet people continue to die of hunger; babies are born, grow up and die without being able to read or write; many fellow humans don't have clean water to drink; and people die of curable diseases," he notes.

He pointed to the fact that the gulf between rich and poor members of the human race continues to widen.

Meanwhile, there are fewer fish in the seas, more carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere, more desertification, more soil erosion and more species extinction, he says.

"The Johannesburg World Summit must take further our pledge at the Millennium Summit to eradicate poverty. It must also speak to he who consumes more than the earth can give," Mbeki notes.

Colin Powell, US secretary of state, writes in the magazine that delivering environmentally-friendly development is vital for delivering a more stable world.

He claims that sustainable development is a "compelling moral and humanitarian issue," adding that it is also a "security imperative."

"Poverty, environmental degradation and despair are destroyers of people, of societies, of nations. This unholy trinity can destabilize countries, even entire regions," he says.

Powell, who is expected to head the US delegation to Johannesburg, says that the summit "is a time of great opportunities to expand peace, prosperity and freedom."

But even before the meeting starts, environmentalists have accused a group of nations led by the US of blocking plans to set any targets and effectively emasculating a draft text on proposed actions.

Many fear that any failure of setting targets in the final Plan of Implementation to be endorsed by world leaders at the summit will make the plan nothing but empty rhetoric.

Klaus Toepfer, executive director of UNEP, noted that failure in Johannesburg cannot be contemplated as the risks are too great.

"What has to be achieved at the summit is a concrete plan and targets of implementation," he said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua, noting that there must be absolutely clear commitments from governments.

"Unless a new course is chartered for planet Earth, we risk a new 'Iron Curtain', dividing not East and West, but the haves and the have-nots, with all the ramifications of increased tensions, jealousies and hatreds between and within countries," he said.

He revealed that more than 70 percent of the Plan of Implementation has been agreed by countries of the world, and what has not been agreed mainly links with the means of implementation such as setting timetables.

"It is extremely necessary to have concrete targets and timetables for implementation and link them with means of implementation," he noted.

Toepfer called on developed countries to back and cooperate with developing countries to fight against poverty to give them the means of implementation.

This should includes increasing official development aid, market opening, decreasing trade subsidies, debt reduction, speeding up clean technology transfer and helping developing countries in their capacity building, he noted.

"What we are doing in Johannesburg is to develop this world toward peace, cooperation and solidarity," the UNEP boss said.

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