Ten days of haggling about the Earth's future in Johannesburg, South Africa, have yielded an action plan and a political declaration, though both are less ambitious that they might have been.
The 192 governments represented and the more than 100 heads of state in attendance partially squandered a grand opportunity to showcase a new sense of solidarity and propel the world down the road to sustainability. Although a few new concrete targets were hashed out, the niggling over numerical targets and other petty debates tarnished the atmosphere and summit agreements.
Thirty years after the groundbreaking U.N. Conference on the Human Environment and a decade after the Rio Conference on Environment and Development, countries were to unite under the umbrella of sustainable development in Johannesburg. Sadly, the World Summit on Sustainable Development opened and closed under a cloud of pessimism, in stark contrast to the wave of optimism that participants rode out of the Rio Earth Summit a decade ago.