Long on Promises, but Short on Specifics

Delegates headed home from an international summit Thursday clutching a 65-page plan that vows to attack nearly every ill on Earth.

But the 10-day global gathering here, once hailed as a broad effort to help preserve the planet, ended as a success more for its promises than for its achievements, participants say.

“Oh boy, is it ambitious!” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a special advisor to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “If this were actually carried out, it would be very good for the world. But there is no, absolutely no evidence of a real strategy to accomplish these goals.”

Although public expectations of action are high, a fundamental problem exists: The plan--which covers everything from rebuilding fisheries, forests and protecting the diversity of species to bringing water, energy and medicine to the poor--is nonbinding.

To avoid continuing stagnation, the U.N. nudged participants at the World Summit on Sustainable Development to form partnerships and pick a project, large or small, that will begin to chip away at environmental or development problems.

Annan’s burgeoning “era of partnerships,” as he calls it, flourished during the conference. Hundreds of governments, private groups, businesses and foundations lined up to announce “partnerships”--sometimes with old partners or even old adversaries.

Environmental activists from Greenpeace and representatives of British Petroleum, who once battled over an oil platform in the North Atlantic, joined hands to push for binding government commitments to stem global warming. Israel and Jordan pledged to work together to breathe life into the Dead Sea, which is ebbing from a shortage of water.

A foundation of Shell Oil teamed up with the World Resources Institute to curb vehicles with the dirtiest exhaust in the world’s biggest cities. “It caught our attention when Shell was giving us money to drive off customers that use their product,” said Jonathan Lash, the institute’s president.

The United States rolled out a series of partnerships to protect Congo’s rain forest, to battle AIDS, and to bring clean water and cleaner energy to impoverished and isolated regions of the world.

Bush administration officials have been vague about financial commitments to these projects and, in turn, been criticized by environmental groups that accuse the U.S. of reshuffling dollars and programs to look like something new.

“The Bush administration has given these partnerships a bad name,” said Jacob Scherr, director of international programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s a shame, because these partnerships are exciting. So many other countries have been inspired by this meeting to participate with concrete actions that can make a difference.”

International environmental and relief organizations piled on the complaints about the Bush administration, both about its proposed partnerships and the U.S. delegation’s successful efforts to weaken language in the summit’s implementation plan.

All of this culminated in the jeering of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell during a speech Wednesday as he stood in for President Bush, who declined to attend the summit that drew more than 100 heads of state and government.

“U.S. Wrecks Earth Summit,” read a flier handed out by the nonprofit environmental group Friends of the Earth. It criticized the administration’s resistance to provisions in the plan to hold corporations more accountable for environmental consequences and the U.S. delegation’s successful efforts to scuttle a European proposal to increase the world’s reliance on nonpolluting solar and wind energy to 15% of power needs by 2010.

The plan now only urges a “substantial increase” in renewable energy--a goal that cannot be measured. “Throughout this summit, the U.S. administration has betrayed our environment and the needs of the poor and the vulnerable,” said Ricardo Navarro, chairman of Friends of the Earth. “That’s why we were protesting during Colin Powell’s shameless and inadequate speech.”

Sachs, the Columbia professor, noted that other administration officials have been booed at AIDS conferences and other international gatherings. “The fact that Colin got jeered shows that the U.S. government doesn’t understand these issues, and doesn’t understand that the rest of the world cares passionately about them,” he said.

Much of the hostility toward the United States has mounted since the Bush administration’s decision to back out of international environmental efforts, such as the Kyoto Protocol, which sets targets to cut emissions blamed for global warming. U.S. officials, along with the Vatican and some conservative Islamic nations, fought to keep women’s health issues out of the summit’s final document. One issue absent from the implementation plan is population growth, even though it lies at the heart of many sustainable development issues: water scarcity, food security, deforestation and energy consumption.

The document has one reference to “reproductive and sexual health,” but no mention of providing reproductive education or birth control in the developing world. U.N. officials said the reason is that neither the environmentalists nor government officials want to engage the foes of abortion.

The Bush administration prevailed in much of the negotiations over wording of the implementation plan. As the world’s richest nation--and the one contributing the most in aid to foreign countries--the U.S. successfully pushed for language requiring governments that receive foreign aid to respect the rule of law and also property rights and to prevent corruption.

The plan was supposed to differ from its predecessor, an agenda set out during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro a decade ago. But this document ended up closer to the Rio document than many participants had hoped.

“It’s not really a plan of implementation,” Sachs said. “It’s actually a very thorough set of exhortations, intentions, goals and targets. The point is, the world readily signs on to bold objectives, without any real sense of how they are going to be met.”

In addition to the implementation plan, the delegates from more than 190 nations issued a declaration: “We commit ourselves to act together, united by a common determination to save our planet, promote human development and achieve universal prosperity and peace.”