Earth Summit Ends on Note of Hope, Not Achievement

The Earth Summit, hailed as the world’s boldest reach for international collaboration, ends today as a success more for its promise than its achievements.

A risky proposition from the start, the global conference produced an ambitious new agenda for environmentally sound development and moved to level the playing field between the world’s poor and rich.

“I was afraid when we began,” confessed Singapore’s Tommy Koh, the summit’s most influential negotiator. “The gap seemed too formidable. Now it has succeeded much more than I had dared hope. We’ve done well.”

In the absence of leadership from the United States, the Europeans, particularly the Netherlands, stepped in and argued for stronger environmental action; Japan offered financial and technological leadership, and India became the most effective negotiator for the developing nations.

China, historically reluctant to support environmental initiatives for fear of crimping future development, agreed to compromises it would have shunned only a few years ago, signing two environmental treaties at the historic meeting.

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development brought together 178 nations and more than 115 heads of state in a sprawling convention center on the outskirts of Rio.

By Saturday night, more than 100 nations had signed both a treaty to curb future global warming and a biological diversity pact to conserve plants, animals and their habitat.

“I think on the whole we can be pretty satisfied--not totally--with what has happened,” said Swiss delegate Wilhelm Schmid. “We are at the beginning of a very long process, but public opinion won’t allow us to go back to business as usual.”

But even if the conference fell short of its brightest dreams, the gathering of delegates of a thousand shades and a hundred tongues marked the first great diplomatic effort of the post-Cold War era.

The Bush Administration, anxious about the November election and the recession, succeeded in removing some key requirements from the global warming treaty.

But the Administration only stalled the inevitable.

By the time the summit was gaveled to order, the focus was already shifting beyond Rio.

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl invited nations signing the global warming treaty to come to Germany next year for a meeting to draft the protocols to strengthen the treaty.

When that phase begins, the United States will again face strong international pressure to set specific dates for reducing emissions of gases that contribute to global warming.

Not insignificantly, the conference also raised public understanding of global ecological problems and helped put “sustainable development” and “biodiversity” into the international lexicon.

Former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., visiting the summit, playfully told the U.S. delegation chief that his audiences during the Democratic primaries had been baffled when he spoke of the need to preserve biological diversity, the term given to encompass both species and their habitat.

But the global attention over Bush’s refusal to sign the biodiversity accord was finally making Brown understood.

Given its soaring early expectations and the news media buildup, the conference could hardly have lived up to its early billing. Some analysts had called it the most important gathering of world leaders in history.

With every word and phrase in the accords requiring consensus, the negotiations were stupifyingly tedious. A U.S. delegate one night spent two hours haggling over the inclusion of the words “fair and just” in a passage in one of the accords.

The recession dampened the prospects for huge amounts of environmental aid, although significant amounts were promised, and the upcoming presidential election influenced the United States’ approach to the summit.

Throughout the conference, Bush appeared to be playing to conservatives, whose base the White House believes he must strengthen to win in November.

The President tried to frame the debate as a conflict between jobs and the environment rather than as an opportunity for the United States to sell its most efficient and cleanest technology abroad. One environmental leader has likened the competition for “green technology” in the next decade to the space race earlier this century.

“We owe the world to be frank about what we have achieved in Rio: progress in many fields, too little progress in most fields and no progress at all in some fields,” Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland told delegates on Saturday.

Indeed, some individual accords proved disappointing.

The dream of summit organizers for a sweeping Earth Charter is not dead, but it has been left for another time and another place. Instead of a global code of conduct, the heavily negotiated document became a contradictory declaration laden with platitudes.

The effectiveness of the biological diversity treaty also became doubtful when the United States announced that it would not sign.

The pact was crafted to give developing nations an economic stake in conserving their forests and species. It encompasses the principle that poor countries should share in the financial benefits of commercially successful products derived from their plants or other organisms.

But the Bush Administration, under pressure from the U.S. biotechnology industry, objected to provisions that treated genetic engineering as potentially unsafe. The Administration also faulted the treaty for failing to safeguard patents, another concern of the biotechnology industry, in which the United States now leads the world.

The U.S. stand on biological diversity and its insistence that the global warming treaty be stripped of timetables and targets had a ripple effect through the negotiations. It alienated developing nations whose support the United States needed for a forest accord. In the end, only a weak statement of principles emerged calling for management of forests in recognition of their ecological importance. There is no commitment to a process that could lead to a future forest treaty.

Some observers here believe the United States made a diplomatic blunder by launching its own forest initiative on the eve of the summit.

Rather than being viewed as genuine concern for forests, the initiative was seen as a hasty U.S. attempt to recover from criticism over the climate and biological diversity treaties. The proposal supports a doubling of funds worldwide for forest management.

Against high odds, summit negotiators managed to complete a blueprint for environmental action in the next century. Called Agenda 21, the plan contains measures to cut energy use, conserve wildlife and protect the oceans. When the summit began, a third of the plan was still in dispute.

Albeit non-binding, Agenda 21 “will keep us busy for the next decade or two,” said a delegate from a developing country.

Above all, the climate treaty is widely viewed as the most significant accomplishment of the summit.

When the Bush Administration succeeded in removing targets and timetables for emission reductions, angry and disappointed environmental activists condemned it as a mere shell of an agreement. Industry lobbyists were delighted.

But time has softened the attitudes.

Richard Mott, an attorney for the World Wildlife Fund, now proclaims the treaty as the “death nail for fossil fuels.”

Nodding at a coal industry lobbyist walking by at summit headquarters, Mott recalled that when the convention was stripped of emission targets, “those guys were coming out with big smiles on their faces. But in a way, those guys had lost.”

He pointed to an objective encoded in the treaty that says warming gases should be limited to a level that will ensure protection of ecosystems, many of which would perish at the levels of temperature change predicted by some scientists. Environmental groups plan to cite that provision in lobbying in the United Nations for substantial energy use reductions.

At Bush’s insistence, the treaty now only requires participating countries to aim for stabilization of emissions of warming gases at 1990 levels by the year 2000.

But even without the legal obligation, “there is going to be considerable political discomfort in this country if our emissions levels are higher than they were in 1990,” Mott said.

Weary of being criticized for weakening the climate treaty, Bush took a preemptive strike during the past couple of days by insisting that nations put forth their plans in January to reduce emissions.

“We are challenging (other nations) to come forward,” Bush said at a news conference Saturday. “We will be there. And I think the Third World and others are entitled to know that the commitments made are going to be commitments kept.”

This could embarrass some of Bush’s environmental critics in Europe who committed to reduction targets and castigated the United States for refusing to go along.

White House aides believe the Europeans have been posturing for the news media and will not be able to meet the target without levying politically unpopular carbon taxes that would raise energy prices substantially.

“Bush is calling their bluff,” said Donald Pearlman, a lobbyist for the coal industry, electrical utilities and railroads.

The conference did not resolve tensions between northern industrialized nations and poorer countries in the Southern Hemisphere, but did give the developing nations a stronger bargaining position.

“The South has very much been an equal partner and has made its weight felt here,” said Schmid of Switzerland. “It’s been a salubrious experience for the industrialized countries, and some have not yet digested that fact.”

The industrialized nations cannot protect themselves from such threats as global warming without the cooperation of the poor countries. Emissions from developing nations are eventually expected to dwarf what the richer nations now produce.

In return for pledging to develop in an environmentally sensitive way, the poor countries were demanding financial aid and technology.

“We are poor countries, and the little we have we will put to alleviate the poverty and despair,” said Noah Nkambule, a delegate from Swaziland in Africa. “But there is now a political commitment to see that development and the environment are taken together.”

Koh of Singapore said developing countries were not leaving the summit dissatisfied that more specific aid measures were not in place. He said decisions on aid have largely been postponed to a U.N. meeting in the fall.

Koh said he was struck by a turnaround in the environmental attitudes of China at the summit. Because of China’s huge population, its participation in environmental agreements is considered crucial for success. In the past, the populous country has been a holdout on environmental pacts.

“They know they can blackmail the West, but to carry out the blackmail they will kill themselves first,” Koh said. “It’s in their self-interest not to pollute the world.”

Many key environmental issues were not dealt with at the summit. Population pressures, although widely discussed, were barely mentioned in the accords. The summit also did not address the need to consider the environment in trade agreements.

“When we arrive at our final consensus here in Rio, we will have taken neither a small step nor a giant leap,” Norway’s Brundtland said. “But the direction of where we are heading will have been set.”

Times staff writer William R. Long also contributed to this story.