The Rio+20 summit marks an important milestone in global efforts to create a sustainable, more equal world. The original Rio declaration in 1992, including goals such as the eradication of poverty, reducing unsustainable production and consumption, and cooperation to protect the world’s ecosystems, is as relevant today as it was 20 years ago. But the challenges posed by climate change, and over-exploitation of natural resources remain, and in many cases are now worse.
The summit needs to make progress to establish sustainable development goals as the bedrock for development when the millennium development goals end in 2015. To do so, governments must move beyond the vague rhetoric of lofty ambitions and set specific, measurable and timebound milestones for 2015 and beyond.
Tonight, over a billion people will go to bed hungry. Another 1.5 billion people are overweight or obese. Food, and equitable access to it, is one of the defining political issues of this century. In April, I visited South Sudan with Oxfam and the World Food Programme, a country where 4.7 million people are food insecure. There can be no food security without political and economic security and the absence of war. People will not plant seeds if they do not know what they will eat tomorrow. They will not invest in tools or irrigation systems if they will be taken in raids. 75 per cent of the world’s subsistence farmers are women. How can they move from subsistence farming, where they are always one bad harvest away from starvation, to access markets and finance that enable them to withstand such shocks? Educating girls and building roads in sub-Saharan African countries must be at the heart of a sustainable global food system.
In 2010, Hilary Benn launched the government’s first food strategy for 50 years, Food 2030. It tackled the difficult issues –what is a sustainable diet, the need to reduce food waste and the food system’s greenhouse gases. Sadly, it appears to have gathered dust on the Defra ministers’ bookshelf, abandoned in favour of a free market strategy on food, an inadequate response to such huge, systemic challenges.
Saving the great tropical forests of Indonesia, Brazil and Democratic Republic of Congo is a key task for Rio+20. Forests provide food and water, support biodiversity, help prevent floods and store carbon. Deforestation, through agricultural expansion, conversion to pasture, infrastructure development, and logging, accounts for around 20 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. The UN’s REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) fund, set up to reduce the poverty of forest people, protect wildlife and pay for carbon services is still in its infancy. Rio+20 must act as a springboard to get more countries ready for REDD funding and widen the donor pool.
At home, we need a long-term, sustainable future for England’s forests which will prevent the sell-off which ministers tried and failed to implement here. Developing countries will look to the British government and see it trying to privatise England’s forests yet preaching quite another approach abroad.
The UK must drive green growth by investing in clean energy, green technology and resource efficiency. The government claims it is ambitious for change, but with the forest sell-off, stalemate on carbon reporting, indifference to growing food and rural poverty at home, and the debate over the planning reforms, this ambition has not been matched by action.
Carbon reporting will be a key driver in creating the regulatory level playing field that business needs to invest in green jobs and growth. Labour in government understood this, and our 2008 Climate Change Act required the government by law, to announce its plans for mandatory carbon reporting by large businesses by April 2012. Yet despite promoting sustainability reporting at Rio, Defra ministers simply threw up their hands when the deadline passed and said carbon reporting at home was too difficult. The government has said that Rio+20 must be a workshop not a talking shop. But it is not enough for ministers to talk the talk on the world stage; they have to walk the walk, back home.
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Mary Creagh MP is Labour’s shadow environment secretary
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SERA the Labour environment campaign has today published a collection of essays on Rio+20 and the challenges of sustainable development with contributions from Mary Creagh MP (shadow environment secretary), Caroline Flint MP (shadow energy secretary), Ivan Lewis MP (shadow international development secretary), Linda McAvan MEP, Richard Howitt MEP and others.
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Photo: Neil Ennis