After over a year of preparatory talks and many long nights of painstaking negotiations in Johannesburg, the World Summit on Sustainable Development concluded on 4 September. With over 140 countries involved, these processes are never easy. The wide range of issues addressed by the World Summit made these negotiations more difficult than most. Was it all worth it, and what will it mean for the UK?
There is much to celebrate in the final agreement. Perhaps most importantly, it was agreed to halve the number of people – currently 1.1 billion – without access to clean water and basic sanitation by 2015. This commitment should save millions of lives, so long as global mechanisms are established to implement it. Over 2.2 million people in developing countries currently die each year from diseases caused solely by lack of access to clean water and sanitation.
The summit also agreed targets and action to protect biodiversity, conserve fish stocks and promote sustainable consumption and production. Crucially, we agreed on joint action on energy, both to improve access to modern energy services for the two billion people that lack them, and also to substantially increase the global share of renewable energy.
This outcome does not fully reflect the UK’s aims for the summit. The nature of international negotiation and the varying perspectives and priorities of participants makes it impossible for any country or regional group to secure all of their objectives. But the summit did agree concrete commitments to drive future action, both internationally and here in the UK.
We can take considerable credit for that. The UK, along with the EU, demonstrated global leadership at the summit. Our efforts built on the UK’s record of international leadership on social and environmental issues. The Prime Minister has led developed countries in his support for the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, and Clare Short has overseen a steady rise in the UK’s international aid programme and the concentration of this programme on the poorest countries. We also played a crucial role in securing international agreement on reductions of global warming gases through the Kyoto agreement and have followed it through with the best national record in reducing emissions of any country, equalled only by Germany.
But the World Summit was a reminder of how far there is to go in tackling the evils of poverty, hunger, disease and environmental degradation. The real challenge started when the summit ended – to deliver the commitments made through action at national and international level.
The UK government already has an overarching programme on sustainable development and a set of indicators of progress against which we report annually. The summit’s conclusions will be integrated into this programme. Our next annual report on sustainable development will be published in January 2003, and will set out in more detail how we are taking forward these conclusions. Here are just two examples.
Sustainable consumption and production is a high priority for our domestic follow-up. The UK, in common with other developed countries, agreed to take the lead on this – separating economic growth from environmental degradation, so that future development respects environmental limits. The UK and EU’s sustainable development strategies should tackle related issues such as energy efficiency and waste minimisation.
We also played a leading role in the creation of the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership at Johannesburg. This involves other countries that are committed to ambitious targets to expand renewable energy, and action to deliver these. The energy white paper in early 2003 will set out our future plans at national level.
To make the follow-up real, we will also support action through the UN to monitor the performance of each country and progress towards global targets, and take action where we are not on track to meet these commitments. This is essential in order to ensure that the global community achieves the targets and commitments made at Johannesburg.
There was much debate over the role of business at the World Summit and in particular over the business partnerships launched at the summit. These are not a substitute for action by government, as some critics seem to believe. They can make an important contribution to our goals and are a valuable part of the overall programme of action. But they will be assessed to determine whether, and how much, they actually deliver.
But government has a unique role. We can, and will, provide the leadership needed to enable all sectors to play a full part in meeting the targets agreed at the World Summit. The Prime Minister made clear in Johannesburg that he and the UK government accept our leadership responsibility, and that ‘Africa and the environment… are the critical challenges confronting today’s world’.