Scientists say the final result of the RIO+20 conference may be the basis for future accords, but it does not attend to the urgent state of global problems (RIO+20)

Lack of focus marks final RIO+20 document
2012-07-11

The final result of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (RIO+20), which ended on June 22 in Rio de Janeiro, is a document lacking focus that does not attend to the urgency of the problems the world is facing. Such is the analysis of Celso Lafer, FAPESP president.

Lack of focus marks final RIO+20 document

The final result of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (RIO+20), which ended on June 22 in Rio de Janeiro, is a document lacking focus that does not attend to the urgency of the problems the world is facing. Such is the analysis of Celso Lafer, FAPESP president.

2012-07-11

Scientists say the final result of the RIO+20 conference may be the basis for future accords, but it does not attend to the urgent state of global problems (RIO+20)

 

By Fábio de Castro

Agência FAPESP – The final result of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (RIO+20), which ended on June 22 in Rio de Janeiro, is a document lacking focus that does not attend to the urgency of the problems the world is facing. Such is the analysis of Celso Lafer, FAPESP president.

Despite this failure, Lafer states that the conference may contribute to an atmosphere that will stimulate a more favorable political context for the establishment of concrete measures for global sustainability.

“The final document is diffuse, lacks focus, and is based on the lowest common denominator. In the best of cases, it places some processes in motion that will be more or less successful in the future,” Lafer told Agência FAPESP.

The document’s lack of focus is the price paid for arriving at a consensus during the conference. According to Lafer, the document will not undergo any more changes by the chiefs of state that participated in the summit.

“I understand what led to this document. The host nation didn’t want the conference to end without a consensus, and because of this, the Brazilian negotiators arrived at this lowest common denominator,” he affirmed.

In practice, the document is not capable of dealing with current urgent matters and fell short of expectations. “[The] government will say that it achieved a consensus that opens processes and preserves the victories made up until now. It is in fact possible that the document has the merit of keeping questions on the table that will be dealt with in a more favorable political context in the future. But if we look at the urgent issues at hand, we can see that the document falls short of expectations and of humanity’s needs,” said Lafer.

According to the FAPESP president, the main explanations for RIO+20’s limitations are the negative international context and the Brazilian government’s delay in prioritizing the topic of the conference.

“Aside from worldwide economic and political crises, we have a new multipolarity in the scenario of international politics that, until now, has not been able to lead us to a more stable global order. The reformulation of the financial system has not been resolved, the commercial negotiations from Doha have stagnated, and there is considerable tension in the Middle East. However, we have a nation that prioritized RIO+20 much less than it did RIO-92. Our government only recently dedicated itself to the conference,” he affirmed.

Directly involved with the organization of RIO-92 as then-minister of Foreign Relations, Lafer affirms that the conference benefitted from favorable international and internal contexts for its success.

“On the international level, the context was the end of the Cold War. It was the first conference that wasn’t organized according to the topics North-South and West-East, but rather in terms of the challenge to cooperate for a reason that encompasses all of humanity. It was a favorable climate,” he said.

“Perhaps the point at which RIO+20 came closest to RIO-92 was in society’s participation in parallel events, including the part of science, which had FAPESP’s support,” said Lafer.

Lafer states that the topic of the environment depends on specialized knowledge. The Convention on Climate Change signed at RIO-92, for instance, would not have been possible without the ballast of the work performed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which detected phenomena such as the greenhouse effect.

“Perhaps the starting point of this relationship between knowledge and diplomatic relations was the scientific perception of what was happening with the ozone layer at the end of the 1980s. This realization led to the Basel Convention, which came into effect in 1992,” said Lafer.

The advent of the Anthropocene

The President of the International Council for Science (ICSU), Yuan-Tseh Lee, stated that a new contract between science and society is necessary if steps toward global sustainability are to be taken.

Lee’s speech on Wednesday, June 20, the first day of the RIO+20 high-level summit, which ended on June 22, synthesized the result of the debates held by the international scientific community at the Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Development, organized by the ICSU, which is considered by the United Nations to be the official representative of the scientific community.

According to Lee, the advent of the Anthropocene—the era in which the activities of human society dominate the planet—represents an unprecedented challenge involving climate change, loss of biodiversity and generalized pollution.

“In the name of the societies of science and technology, we call on world leaders to act immediately. Without action, there will be increased risk of irreversible changes to the biosphere, which will undermine the sustainability of life on Earth,” he said. Lee states that these studies show that answering the challenges of the Anthropocene requires a systematic transformation founded on knowledge and innovation.

Science + society

During his visit to FAPESP, also on June 20, the United Kingdom’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington affirmed that the scientific community arrived at RIO+20 with a clear and well-consolidated message.

“With the exception of isolated uncertainties that always characterize scientific topics, dissent within the international science community is nearly nonexistent on key questions like food security, water security, biodiversity, ecosystem services or climate change itself. This universal consensus was well presented at RIO+20,” he said.

However, Beddington states that if it is to influence the world agenda following the conference, the scientific community will need to work together with other sectors of society and depend on the political will of decision makers.

“I believe the scientific consensus will have a great influence on the world agenda, but it will not act on its own; rather, it will act together with civil society and governments. This is the real importance of the event. An international conference with so many nations and delegates from diverse segments all participating is a reason for hope,” he said.

The task, however, is extremely difficult, involving deeply complex and urgent questions, such as how to deal with large populations and urban growth, the scarcity of resources, the energy crisis and the environmental crisis.

 

  Republish
 

Republish

The Agency FAPESP licenses news via Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) so that they can be republished free of charge and in a simple way by other digital or printed vehicles. Agência FAPESP must be credited as the source of the content being republished and the name of the reporter (if any) must be attributed. Using the HMTL button below allows compliance with these rules, detailed in Digital Republishing Policy FAPESP.