Sobering Up After an Environmental Binge

Like a college student at a frat party, much of the world is on a binge.

Oil and gas are being consumed faster than ever. Emissions of pollutants and global-warming gases are at an all-time high. Forests are shrinking. Market fish are being pulled from the sea faster than they can repopulate. And 11,000 species, including one in four mammals, are threatened with extinction.

Although President Bush is a very notable no-show, more than 100 presidents and prime ministers and even a sprinkling of kings will join a cast of thousands at a U.N. summit opening here today on how to sustain the Earth. The last time the world’s leaders gathered like this was in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. At that meeting, trumpeted boldly around the globe as the Earth Summit, delegates signed pledges to slow, if not stop, the degradation of the planet.

They didn’t. Most indicators show its health getting worse. So leaders have been arriving here a bit warily, but also determined to show tangible progress.

“By and large, the picture is bleak,” Nitin Desai, secretary-general of what is being called the World Summit on Sustainable Development, said in an interview. “So the main point of this summit is action, not on all fronts, but in critical areas where we need a quantum change.”

This time, summit leaders will push a strategy they hope will lead to quicker action. Instead of waiting for all nations to sign a treaty before setting to work, U.N. officials are nudging clusters of governments, businesses and citizen groups to forge partnerships to get moving on a specific problem or in one region--and hoping the momentum builds.

Many of these partnerships, it is anticipated, will focus on helping the nearly 3 billion people who live in poverty gain access to clean water, proper sanitation and energy--much of it from renewable sources such as solar and wind or from alternative fuels derived from sugar cane or corn.

The idea is simple: Help Third World nations develop in such a way that they can leapfrog over past mistakes in the United States and elsewhere that resulted in polluting the air, the water and the land in the name of convenience and economic progress.

Other partnerships are expected to tackle pollution in the developed world that is contributing to global warming and posing other threats to the environment, to endangered species and to human health. Such global issue networks may focus on everything from halting overfishing to reducing reliance on fossil fuels to phasing out cancer-causing chemicals.

“We are trying to change the way people act,” Desai said Sunday.

He and other leaders acknowledged that won’t be easy. But they said that the 104 heads of state and government and other national leaders have committed themselves to the summit, creating a “critical mass” of world leadership to get things done.

“Even though President Bush won’t be here, the conference will be just as successful,” said Nkosazana Zuma, South Africa’s foreign minister.

Bush announced last week that he would not attend the summit and was dispatching Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to lead the U.S. delegation, but only during the final days of the nearly two-week gathering. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman will join the delegation.

To soften criticism of its go-it-alone policy on the summit, the Bush administration does plan to announce an additional $4.5 billion in programs to assist developing nations deal with shortages of water, energy and food, and to preserve forests in the Congo Basin.

Meeting with foreign journalists last week, Paula J. Dobriansky, the State Department’s undersecretary for global affairs, downplayed the environmental focus of the Johannesburg, South Africa, summit. She characterized it as more of an economic forum, a continuation of the administration’s efforts at a trade gathering in Doha, Qatar, in November and a development summit in March in Monterrey, Mexico. In Monterrey, the U.S. pledged $5 billion to developing countries that adopt sound economic policies and fight corruption.

“This summit is about sustainable development,” Dobriansky said. “That means we’re talking about economic reform, we’re talking about environmental stewardship, and we’re talking about a social agenda.... A combination of all three.”

The president’s decision to skip the meeting caused a pileup of domestic conservation groups and Democratic politicians to denounce his “snub” of fellow world figures and his forfeiture of leadership.

Criticism also is expected from European delegates, who are frustrated at the lack of leadership from the world’s biggest polluter when it comes to greenhouse gases.

While European countries reduced carbon dioxide emissions by about 2% between 1990 and 2000, greenhouse-gas emissions surged by 18% in the United States, according to statistics compiled by the United Nations and others. The statistics show that the United States is now responsible for 24% of such emissions worldwide.

Yet Bush has delighted some of his conservative constituents by turning his back on the summit. A group of conservative organizations, ranging from the Competitive Enterprise Institute to the Texas Eagle Forum and Americans Against U.N. Control, wrote him a letter praising him for shunning the “anti-freedom, anti-people, anti-globalization and anti-Western agendas.”

Jerry Taylor, of the libertarian Cato Institute, said that by not attending, Bush spoiled the fun of his European critics.

“They had hoped to beat on the president like a Mexican pinata for his refusal to go along with the Kyoto Protocol and the rest of their environmental agenda,” he said.

The Johannesburg summit is the third in a series of such international meetings. The first, the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, inspired developed nations to begin dealing with acid rain. The second was the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which led to treaties on global warming and biodiversity as well as an action plan for the 21st century, called Agenda 21.

Yet most of that agenda, with its 4,000 recommendations, has gathered dust. So the U.N. began pushing for this conference.

Delegates again will haggle over the language of goals, timetables and political statements. Mainly, their focus is expected to be on how to move beyond the goals adopted in Rio with partnerships and projects that translate words into action.

“Almost all countries have had to do studies on what they’ve done since 1992 and have filed reports,” said Elizabeth R. DeSombre, a Wellesley College professor of environmental studies who will attend the summit. “The mere fact of gathering the information mobilizes people to do things.”

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, the former California governor who will also be an attendee, said that in many instances, local governments are stepping into the breach.

“If there is complacency at the top in the Bush administration,” he said, “there has to be more activism at the bottom.”

The campaign to eliminate leaded gasoline is frequently cited as a model of how environmental programs can grow. It began with a partnership between the United Nations and the World Bank and slowly spread to more than 50 countries. Now, about 86% of the world’s fuel supply is lead-free--greatly reducing a toxin that can cause brain damage, particularly in children.

“What’s so exciting is that so many different institutions are trying to figure out how to move forward,” said Jacob Scherr, director of international programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I like to call it the down-to-earth summit.”

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren in Washington contributed to this report.