Expectations for Summit Come Down to Earth

The Earth Summit, once heralded as a sweeping global effort to attack the planet’s environmental ills, will open in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday amid vastly reduced expectations.

Hopes for major breakthroughs on threats ranging from global warming to the loss of forests plummeted during negotiations over the past several months as developing nations demanded money and technology in exchange for environmental reform and industrialized nations bristled at being blamed for their problems.

Compounding the tensions is a fundamental difference in the perception of the conference. Poorer nations have tended to view it primarily as a conference on development; wealthier countries as a meeting on the environment.

Called the Conference on Environment and Development, the United Nations-sponsored meeting was scheduled before the recession and the breakup of the Soviet bloc. An economic downturn in industrialized countries has shifted political attention from the environment to bread-and-butter issues, and funds for environmental projects in the Third World must compete with aid to the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries.

With those changes, the conference increasingly is being viewed as a beginning, not a conclusion, an opportunity to get something on the table that can be strengthened later.

“Rio leaves us with a lot of processes that may lead to action someday,” said Scott Hajost, international counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund. “The issue is, will it leave enough of a process to make a difference?”

The answer depends on what happens during the 12 days of talks in Rio de Janeiro. Up for signature will be treaties on global warming and wildlife conservation, an ambitious agenda of environmental action for the next century and a declaration of principles on the importance of being able to grow economically without destroying the environment.

For the first time, more than 100 heads of state will meet to discuss environmental concerns, elevating those issues to a level previously enjoyed only by such issues as trade and arms control.

Some nations may use the conference to launch environmental initiatives or to pledge specific amounts of aid to help poorer countries develop in an environmentally sound manner.

Delegates will grapple with ways to share the latest technologies with developing nations without compromising ownership rights and to put in place a system to monitor global environmental initiatives.

The theme of the conference is sustainable development: exploiting resources for economic gain without destroying them. The challenge is to meet today’s needs without degrading forests, waterways and other natural resources that future generations will need for survival.

Poorer nations say they must have aid if they are to develop without resorting to the cheap, inefficient and polluting technology that allowed industrial nations to prosper at the environment’s expense.

“This is the first time that the world has put the environment and sustainable development very high on its agenda and that probably will never be lost,” said Donna Wise, vice president of the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental think tank. “Heretofore, some developing countries would not say the word environment, but now they are talking seriously about the environment and development.”

The centerpiece of Earth Summit was supposed to be a strong treaty to curb emission of gases that could lead to climate change.

Scientists, relying on computer models, predict that temperatures will climb between 3 degrees and 8 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the next century if emissions continue unchecked. The chief culprit is carbon dioxide, released by the burning of such fossil fuels as coal, oil and natural gas.

The European Community wanted a treaty requiring signing nations to reduce their emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. But the United States, which emits more carbon dioxide than any nation, balked.

The Bush Administration argued that such a limit could hurt the U.S. economy and was unjustified by science. Researchers do not know exactly how much temperatures will climb, how quickly and how various regions of the world will be affected.

At U.S. insistence, nations agreed only to try to reduce their emissions to 1990 levels. There is no binding target.

If the United States got its way in climate change, developing nations got theirs in a draft treaty to conserve the world’s biological diversity, which includes plants, animals and microorganisms and their habitats.

Although lacking many specific requirements for conservation, the treaty pledges aid and possible technological assistance to help developing nations protect their wildlife.

The pact calls for more parks and reserves, requires environmental impact statements on federal projects that could harm wildlife and asks nations to make conservation of plants and animals a consideration in national planning.

But the United States has decided not to sign the accord and some other industrialized nations may follow. The Bush Administration objects to provisions that could be interpreted as a weakening of protections for patents and trade secrets.

A U.S. official familiar with treaty talks complained that a U.N. environmental official closed the negotiations after accepting language proposed by the Third World and opposed by the United States and other nations. If the United States signed the treaty, Third World nations might be encouraged to pursue similar tactics in future negotiations, the official said.

“I won’t say we got rolled because we didn’t,” the official said. “But if we were to sign it at this point, that would be one way of looking at it.”

Officials also are unhappy with language that could lead to a substantial revision of the Global Environmental Facility, the conduit for aid administered by the World Bank and two U.N. agencies.

A more sweeping action plan called Agenda 21, a non-binding blueprint for environmental initiatives in the 21st Century, is expected to be completed and signed at the summit. The plan, running more than 800 pages, touches on everything from population control to conservation of ocean resources to sewage disposal.

Maurice Strong, secretary general of the conference, previously estimated that the initiatives outlined in Agenda 21 would require $125 billion a year in aid to the Third World.

But others have suggested that the cost may run as high as $400 billion. Negotiators have said there may be only $5 billion to $12 billion a year to pay for it.

Delegates also will consider a non-binding 29-point statement of principles building upon the historic Stockholm environmental declaration issued in 1972.

Although the Stockholm pronouncement made environmental protection a fundamental obligation of mankind, the broader declaration drafted for Rio addresses the complex link between the environment and development--making sustainable development the objective of rich and poor. The Rio Declaration calls for reform of natural resource consumption and production practices, promotion of “appropriate demographic policies” or family planning, cooperative efforts to alleviate poverty, and accelerated transfer of new technologies to developing countries.

Although the declaration is a pale imitation of what environmentalists wanted, its emphasis on international obligations and special responsibilities of developed countries still rankles conservatives, who had hoped that President Bush would stay away from the meeting.

Environmental activists initially had urged Bush to attend but then derided him for pledging to go after his Administration succeeded in weakening the global warming convention. More recently, activists’ disappointment has given way to the hope that the summit will provide a foundation for future measures. A U.N. environmental official, reflecting this attitude, recently compared efforts to reach environmental agreements at the summit to the history of global efforts to protect the ozone layer.

Those efforts began 17 years ago with a weak treaty. But as scientists found more convincing proof of harm to the ozone shield, the agreement was strengthened. Now it calls for an almost total phaseout of ozone-destroying chemicals.

“I just hope people will not be too discouraged if they don’t get the millennium at the Rio conference,” said World Bank President Barber B. Conable.