Uncertainty overshadows Earth summit

The largest United Nations gathering in history is to start in Johannesburg in nine days' time, with nations reflecting on the progress -- or the lack of it -- toward achieving a more sustainable world over the past decade and wrangling over how to do a better job in the future.

But with few in agreement on what would constitute a successful meeting or what role Japan should play in achieving that aim, participants will be gathering under a cloud of uncertainty.

More than 60,000 delegates, businesspeople and members of nongovernmental organizations are expected to attend the World Summit on Sustainable Development, slated to run from Aug. 26 to Sept. 4.

Upward of 600 participants to the sequel of the landmark Earth Summit, or the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, will be from Japan.

As in Rio, over 100 top government leaders, including Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, are scheduled to swoop in and repeat their commitments to do a better job of fighting poverty and environmental problems. U.S. President George W. Bush, however, is unlikely to be among them.

Many speculate that Bush's lack of interest in the environment, as demonstrated by the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Kyoto climate agreement, is behind his administration's failure to declare that he will attend.

Unlike a decade ago, the runup to this parley has been rocky and shy of enthusiasm.

"In 1992, the summit was top news. Biodiversity and climate change were making headlines. Now there is more interest in the environment, but very little in the summit," said Naoto Anzai, a former journalist who now works for Friends of the Earth Japan.

The prevailing sentiment among environmentalists is one of pessimism. Some even believe the entire project is an exercise in futility.

"It will be just like in 1992. NGOs and governments got together and were very serious and made lots of promises but left few results to show. I don't know why they bother doing the same thing all over again," said Harumi Suda, a representative of Shimin Undo National Center and joint chair of the Japan Center for Climate Change Actions.

Due largely to a lack of information and a yardstick to measure it by, the jury is still out on exactly how unsustainable the Earth has become. During the 1990s, 2.4 percent -- or 94 million hectares -- of the world's forests vanished, energy consumption continued to climb and wildlife was lost at an unprecedented rate.

This time there is no treaty on climate change or biodiversity -- like those adopted at Rio -- to rally around. Nations know that sustainability is the goal, but how to achieve it remains elusive.

New terms a decade later

This time around, the conference has evolved beyond Rio's emphasis on the dichotomous-sounding "environment and development." In Johannesburg, delegates will tackle the more socially inclusive and holistic -- yet still slippery -- goal of "sustainable development."

The centerpiece of the negotiations will be a "plan of implementation" that sets out time-bound numerical targets to protect the environment and help the world's poor.

These include some goals that have already been agreed upon, such as the halving of poverty by 2015, mixed in with other less quantified objectives and some targets that are more contentious.

Leaders are also expected to at least approve a political declaration confirming their commitment to the goals articulated at Rio and the U.N. Millennium Summit.

Although around three-quarters of the plan has been approved by participating nations, the stickier issues -- numbers and touchy semantics -- remain unresolved.

Specifically, Japan is opposed to putting a time frame on reducing harmful chemicals, energy subsidies and achieving sanitation targets. It is also dead set against numerical targets for renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind and water power.

Indeed, this is the one target that high-level officials predict Japan will refuse to budge on.

"We don't think it is right to set an across-the-board standard for all countries to obey. A numerical target is simply not suitable (for renewable energy)," said Junya Nakano, assistant director of the Foreign Ministry's Global Environment Division.

Likewise, trade and finance issues promise to be divisive, especially the question of official developmental assistance. Most industrialized nations have fallen miserably short of the pledge made in Rio to allocate 0.7 percent of their gross national product to aid, while developing countries are clamoring for more financial help.

In reality, this ratio slipped to an average of 0.22 percent among industrialized nations in 2000, down from 0.32 percent a decade earlier, according to the Development Assistance Committee, a Paris-based group of major aid donors. Japan's ratio fell from 0.31 to 0.28, while the U.S. figure dropped from 0.18 to 0.1 over the same period.

Europe and the United States have pledged to increase aid expenditures, whereas Japan, which recently lost its position as the world's largest aid donor, has only been able to ask for patience as its anemic economy is likely to force the government to further trim ODA spending this year.

With few clear indications of what the summit will achieve, or its implications for Japan, the government, public and the media have remained silent in the runup to the event. Many smaller NGOs and newspapers, even specialist environmental publications, are skipping Johannesburg due to concerns about the high cost.

Poverty not center stage

For some, poverty and consumption patterns are simply not topics that strike a chord in Japan.

"(Japanese NGOs) might have information about (poverty), realize it is important and feel a sense of crisis, but it is hard to link to a group's activities," said Miwako Kurosaka, of Japan's Committee for Sustainable Development, which consists of representatives of NGOs, the government and the private sector.

Indeed, the government orchestrated an effort to cobble together proposals from NGOs for the summit. One result has been a proposal for a decade of sustainable development education that has already been written into the implementation plan. High-level officials hope the proposal will boomerang and prompt similar educational initiatives in Japan.

While a slew of environmental legislation and strengthened administrative mechanisms to promote recycling, ban dioxin, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and soil contamination have been spawned over the last decade, in real terms, little has changed.

"The image and laws might exist, but environmental considerations are not integrated into economic policy," Kurosaka claimed.

Part of the problem may be found in the fuzziness of the concept of sustainable development. When the government talks about the issue, it is often not clear where the emphasis lies.

"Those in the Environment Ministry mean development that is environmentally maintainable, but those in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry mean sustainable economic growth," said Tai Harada, a researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

Domestically, Agenda 21 -- a blueprint covering social and environmental goals for sustainable development pounded out in Rio and upon which many hopes rested -- has been slow to make inroads. All of Japan's 47 prefectures and 12 large cities have drawn up individual versions, but only 184 of the more than 3,000 smaller municipalities have done so.

Still, others see Japan at a crossroads. Akio Morishima, head of the Environment Ministry's Central Environment Council, takes a more optimistic view than many.

"Sustainable development is a process of evolution, not revolution," he cautioned, suggesting that after a decade of signing environmental legislation, a shift to a more sustainable society is just around the corner.

Postsummit Japan

It is not clear what the summit portends for Japan. Some worry that if the gathering is seen as a failure, momentum could be sapped from domestic and international environmental initiatives.

"If the summit fails, there will be no immediate negative effects for Japan. But I worry that it could weaken citizens' interest in environment issues," said Hironori Hamanaka, the Environment Ministry's vice minister for global environmental affairs.

"The summit will be a success if a plan of implementation and a political declaration are agreed upon," Hamanaka said, noting anything beyond that will be icing on the cake.

Government officials are sanguine that closed-door talks in July among a limited number of participants in New York -- roundly criticized by citizens' groups as being an undemocratic attempt to manufacture consent -- helped smooth over differences among some of the participants and will expedite the brokering of agreements in Johannesburg.

The success of those deals should be immediately apparent as negotiations proceed.

"We have various domestic problems, including financial concerns, but the Johannesburg Summit is the jumping off point for thinking about sustainable development in the 21st century," said Koichi Takahashi, director general of the Foreign Ministry's multilateral cooperation department.

"The most important thing is that nations, NGOs and everyone else reconfirm their positions and resolve to take concrete action," he added.

But whether enough political will can be mustered to translate promises into action -- and make future summits more upbeat or even unnecessary -- is the key question.

The following is a chronology of major developments in the effort to build a more sustainable world:

1972 -- United Nations Conference on the Human Environment is held in Stockholm. U.N. Environment Program is established.

1992 -- U.N. Conference on Environment and Development is held in Rio de Janeiro, resulting in the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Convention on Biological Diversity, Agenda 21 action plan and the Rio Declaration.

1994 -- Conference on Population and Development is held in Cairo, establishing a plan to stabilize population growth.

1995 -- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases its first comprehensive report on climate change, lending urgency to the issue.

1997 -- The Third Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC in Kyoto agrees on the Kyoto Protocol, setting a target for industrialized countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5.2 percent of 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.

1999 -- Third World Trade Organization ministerial conference is held, characterized by protests over globalization and demands for better environmental and social policies. Global population tops 6 billion.

2000 -- World Water Forum is held in The Hague, focusing on increasing concern about water scarcity. Millennium U.N. Summit is held in New York, laying out plans for halving poverty and improving the plight of the world's poor.

2001 -- The United States pulls out of the Kyoto Protocol for domestic economic reasons. The IPCC releases its third and most comprehensive report, blaming human activities for the majority of global warming over the last half-century.

2002 -- Japan ratifies the Kyoto Protocol.