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WANTED! ENVIRONMENTAL LEADERSHIP - UK AND GLOBAL.
Ten years ago, world leaders met in Rio for the UN Conference on Environment and Development. Rio marked an official recognition: that environmental protection need not conflict with social and economic development. And it led to two significant and tangible outcomes: the Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Ten years on, we are facing another summit - The World Summit on Sustainable Development (or Earth Summit), which is to be held in Johannesburg in August. Unfortunately, with little evidence of strong political leadership so far, this is already looking like a non-event. Tony Blair did say over a year ago that he would go. But few of his fellow leaders have confirmed their attendance yet.
If the summit in Johannesburg delivers no groundbreaking new agreements it may be no bad thing - it is the unwillingness to deliver on promises, not the inability to make them, that generally hampers international processes on environment or development. But we really do need a commitment from governments to implement the existing two conventions, made at Rio, 10 years ago:
The Convention on Climate Change
Governments need to focus on promoting the solutions to climate change, inparticular renewable energy.
Two billion of the world's people (one person in three) lack access to electricity or other modern power systems. They have to walk miles to collect firewood - back breaking labour that denudes the local environment, leading to erosion and flooding. They lack any light for studying, making it virtually impossible to change their situation. They need and deserve power. But conventional fossil-fuelled power would both increase greenhouse emissions and exacerbate local air pollution problems. Instead, the international community must provide them with modern, clean, renewable energy.
Two years ago Tony Blair, to his credit, recognised the urgency of this issue and persuaded the G8 to set up a Task Force to look into it. The Task Force, co-chaired by the former Head of Shell, Mark Moody Stewart, recommended a programme to bring renewable energy to an extra one billion people, about half of them in developing countries. This was too radical for Bush, who ensured that the report was shelved at the G8 meeting in Genoa last year.
Since last year Greenpeace has been running a joint campaign with the Body Shop and the Intermediate Technology Development group (ITDG)
