UN summit outcome leaves nobody happy
Source: Agencies |
June 24, 2012, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
NOBODY is happy in Rio.
Not the legion of bleary-eyed government negotiators from 188 nations who met in a failed attempt to find a breakthrough at the United Nations conference on sustainable development.
Not the thousands of activists who decried the three-day summit as dead on arrival. Not even the top UN official who organized the international organization's largest-ever event which ended on Friday, local time.
"This is an outcome that makes nobody happy. My job was to make everyone equally unhappy," said Sha Zukang, Secretary-General of the conference.
In the end, this conference was a conference to decide to have more conferences.
That result was hailed as a success by the 100 heads of state who attended. Given how environmental summits have fallen off the cliff in recent years as global economic turmoil squashes political will to take on environmental issues, the mere fact of agreeing to talk again constitutes victory.
Faced with the prospect of complete failure, negotiators ended up opting for the lowest common denominator. Hours before the meeting opened Wednesday, they agreed on a proposal that makes virtually no progress beyond what was signed at the original 1992 Earth Summit, removing contentious proposals.
Some of the biggest issues activists wanted to see in the document that didn't make it in included a call to end subsidies for fossil fuels, language underscoring the reproductive rights of women and words on mutually protecting the high seas.
"We saw anything of value in the early text getting removed one by one," said Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo.
The gathering did produce some individual promises. Among those, the US agreed to partner more than 400 companies in efforts to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains.
Not the legion of bleary-eyed government negotiators from 188 nations who met in a failed attempt to find a breakthrough at the United Nations conference on sustainable development.
Not the thousands of activists who decried the three-day summit as dead on arrival. Not even the top UN official who organized the international organization's largest-ever event which ended on Friday, local time.
"This is an outcome that makes nobody happy. My job was to make everyone equally unhappy," said Sha Zukang, Secretary-General of the conference.
In the end, this conference was a conference to decide to have more conferences.
That result was hailed as a success by the 100 heads of state who attended. Given how environmental summits have fallen off the cliff in recent years as global economic turmoil squashes political will to take on environmental issues, the mere fact of agreeing to talk again constitutes victory.
Faced with the prospect of complete failure, negotiators ended up opting for the lowest common denominator. Hours before the meeting opened Wednesday, they agreed on a proposal that makes virtually no progress beyond what was signed at the original 1992 Earth Summit, removing contentious proposals.
Some of the biggest issues activists wanted to see in the document that didn't make it in included a call to end subsidies for fossil fuels, language underscoring the reproductive rights of women and words on mutually protecting the high seas.
"We saw anything of value in the early text getting removed one by one," said Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo.
The gathering did produce some individual promises. Among those, the US agreed to partner more than 400 companies in efforts to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains.
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