High sentiments but low hope at Rio development conference

Negotiators worked for months to hammer out a document that many hoped would lay out clear goals on how nations could promote sustainable development – making economic advances without eating up the world’s resources.

But with time running out, contentious issues like technology transfers from rich to poor nations and new financing for developing countries have been set aside.

While Russian leader Vladimir Putin and China’s premier Wen Jiabao are among those expected to attend the talks in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, there are high-level absentees, including Prime Minister David Cameron, United States President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, adding to criticism that Rio is not getting the global spotlight.

Diplomats have agreed on what all call a mere beginning, a step towards a roadmap on how to embrace sustainable development at the conference – dubbed Rio+20 – coming two decades after the 1992 Earth Summit put sustainable development on the agenda.

Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo said: “The future we want has gotten a little further away today. Rio+20 has turned into an epic failure. It has failed on equity, failed on ecology and failed on economy.”

He went on: “This is not a foundation on which to grow economies or pull people out of poverty, it’s the last will and testament of a destructive 20th-century development model.”

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged the world has made little progress on environmental issues since the first Rio meeting in 1992, but said leaders were working to reverse that at the Rio+20 summit.

“Twenty years ago, the Earth Summit put sustainable development on the global agenda. Yet let me be frank: our efforts have not lived up to the measure of the challenge,” he told delegates. “For too long, we have behaved as though we could indefinitely burn and consume our way to prosperity. Today, we recognise that we can no longer do so.”

“We recognise that the old model for economic development and social advancement is broken. Rio+20 has given us a unique chance to set it right.”

Critics blasted the draft document put before leaders as requiring little and using language that turns what were once demands into goals for individual nations to aspire to.

French President Francois Hollande told reporters he was not too excited about the summit’s likely results.

“Disappointment, yes, there’s always a bit of disappointment. But I’ve come here to show my hope, my confidence.”

He highlighted what he said were two shortcomings: the failure of the document to create an international agency for development and also the inability of negotiators to agree on additional ways of financing sustainable development, including through a tax on financial transactions.

The same roadblocks that have hindered all environmental summits in recent years have been seen in Rio. Delegates from developing nations said the US and other developed nations would not agree to any language in the Rio+20 document that would mandate direct transfers of environmentally sound technologies.

The US and other rich nations have said that violates intellectual property laws, while poorer nations insist there is no way they can afford to pay for advanced equipment.

The economic crisis casts a clear shadow over Rio+20. With Europe in crisis and the US still in economic doldrums, delegates said there was no way those nations would agree on new financing for poorer nations.