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Issue 20: October 2002

COMMENT

Hans van Ginkel is Rector of UN University. These are his personal views.

World Summit a 'stepping-stone' on
path to sustainable development

By Hans van Ginkel

The environment has steadily worsened in the last 30 years despite the many actions society has taken. We are increasingly seeing the effects of climate change through wild fires, flooding, and irregular weather patterns.  Deforestation continues unfettered at a rate of 1% a year and the impact of globalization is increasing the strain on the use of our natural resources.

Sustainable development has slipped down the political totem pole and has become overshadowed by concerns for security and economic globalization.

The recent World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg was an effort to halt this slide, an opportunity to rejuvenate work on sustainable development. A consensus emerged that the issues that must be tackled are the tough, practical ones such as poverty, education, financing and strengthening the governance systems that oversee our actions to protect the environment. 

Strong institutions are a prerequisite for building any kind of international cooperation. Yet, in the environmental world, global institutions are perhaps amongst the weakest and most poorly coordinated. Sustainable development is all about the tradeoff the environment must make with social and economic imperatives, but there is no strong mechanism to bring environmental, societal and economic concerns together.

As a result issues like “trade and environment” or “how to manage globalization” become insurmountable obstacles to achieving sustainable development. There are many opportunities for synergies among these institutions, but we must first recognize the weaknesses in the present systems and then design a system that will work. The pattern of creating and recreating institutions is leading nowhere but more fragmentation and a proliferation of bureaucracy.

Education is another key. Never in the history of humankind has science and technology offered so much for the greater good of society at large. However, the potential that science and technology can offer to bridge the development gap and to alleviate poverty is yet to be flagged as a major issue for the summit. More science is needed rather than less and it has to be directed towards sustainable development.

This will only be done when science for sustainability is mainstreamed into our education systems at all levels---from primary to higher education. A global learning alliance must be created for sustainable development and this will only come from the development of a new social contract between science and technology and society for sustainable development, an outcome that many scientific organizations called for at Johannesburg. 

Poverty and financing for development are two issues on which we have seen little progress yet they are central to a sustainable future. The picture is dim on both fronts. Overseas development assistance (ODA) flows have fallen during the 1990s, from $58.3 billion in 1992 to $53.1 billion in 2000. ODA, as a proportion of Gross National Product, fell from 0.35% in 1992 to 0.22 % in 2000. Only five countries – Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden – met the aid target of 0.7% of GDP in 2000. Most of the least developed countries suffered a decline in ODA of at least 25%, and seven countries, all in Africa, saw ODA reduced by more than 50%. 

On poverty the record is even worse. Only 15% of the world’s population, in high-income countries, account for 56% of the world’s total consumption, while the poorest 40%, in low-income countries, account for only 11% of consumption. The overall poverty rate in developing countries, based on an income poverty line of one dollar a day dropped slightly from 1.3 billion in 1990 to 1.2 billion in 1998. 

There are at least 1.1 billion people who still lack access to safe drinking water and 2.4 billion who lack adequate sanitation. About 815 million people in the world are undernourished. In many developing countries, poor health conditions prevail as a result of contaminated water, poor sanitation, severe indoor air pollution, malaria and other infectious diseases, and the spread of HIV/AIDS. 

Whereas two previous world conferences, the Millennium Assembly and the Monterrey Financing for Development have put in place the targets for these commitments, it is hoped that the momentum from Johannesburg will result in their actual achievement. Certainly it created a better understanding of the link between poverty and the environment and the need for a common approach. 

Looking back on the three decades since the international environmental movement began, it really has come a long way. The first global summit in Stockholm in 1972 was the signaling point that the environment was in trouble. Twenty years latter the Rio Earth Summit was concerned about what exactly needed to be done. In Johannesburg, the WSSD advanced a sense of how to actually implement sustainable development – not an easy task, but one essential to our ultimate well-being.

RECTOR'S STATEMENT TO WSSD 

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