Our correspondent in Rio de Janeiro Daniel Schweimler brings us the latest updates from the UN Conference on Sustainable Development currently underway.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff Opens Rio+20 Summit (Photo: Roberto Stuckert Filho/PR, courtesy of Brazilian government.)
If the future of our planet rests on decisions being made at the Rio+20 conference in Rio de Janeiro then we have reason for both hope and despair.
The irony of sitting in traffic for two hours every morning to get to the conference centre is not lost on participants here to discuss the causes of climate change, one of the most obvious being the burning of fossil fuels in our cars and buses. Although the Brazilians would point out that they are the world leaders in the development and use of ethanol, an alternative, cleaner biofuel.
Twenty years after the first major earth summit to discuss how to reduce the CO2 gas emissions that most agree cause the earth’s temperature to rise, they are back in Rio.
A lot has changed in twenty years. Scientists will tell us that average annual temperatures have gone up. Climate change has become an issue. Farmers, human rights activists, women’s and youth groups, indigenous communities, religious organisations and many more have now joined the debate.
The more people involved the more difficult it is to reach consensus. The world’s leaders haggle over the wording of documents at yearly meetings around the world. It was Durban last year, it will be Qatar in November.
The poorer countries say the rich nations cause the pollution from which they suffer; droughts and flooding get worse every year, therefore the rich should pay.
The developed world has been slow to react and even slower to pay. Some, the most notable culprit being the United States, hardly admit that climate change is a man-made problem at all. And they are the world’s biggest polluters with China catching up fast.
Business now wants to be green with even vehicle manufacturers in competition with one another to prove to their customers that they are the cleanest.
The delegates in Rio have a draft resolution that more than 130 countries plan to sign on Friday. But many environmentalists have criticised it as being too weak. They say it does not oblige the developing countries to cut their carbon gas emissions.
As the helicopters carry the world leaders over the traffic to the conference centre, an alternative people’s conference is going on in a park near the centre of Rio.
Indigenous people from Brazil’s Amazon and the Peruvian Andes, environmental organisations from around the world and an array of religious representatives are here, angry and frustrated at the slow progress being made by their political leaders.
We are still a long way from solving the issue of climate change. But twenty years on we have a much clearer idea of what the problem is, some of the solutions are apparent and more people than ever before are involved in the debate. The debate is raging. But as some of the more pessimistic here in Rio are saying: “The clock is ticking.”
