By Ralf Fücks
Ladies and Gentleman, Dear Friends and Colleagues,
It's a special pleasure to welcome you all to the grand opening of the "boell forum" 2002 here in the heart of the Global People’s Forum. This will be a place of critical reflection, background information, political proposals and cross-over discussions during the next two weeks, which should be so important for the future of our planet.
To be here at this place and this time is a very special moment for our foundation in general and for me personally. Two and a half year ago I couldn't imagine, that our decision to put the Jo'burg-Summit right in the center of the foundation’s agenda would gain such a momentum and lead to such widespread activities in cooperation with partners and friends all around the world. (If you are interested to learn more about our contributions to the world summit we prepared some written information to be collected outside this hall).
This evening I want to highlight the "Jo'burg-Memo: Fairness in a fragile world" - a remarkable piece of brainwork, created by a group of 16 authors with different cultural, political and professional backgrounds, but all committed to the big challenge of the 21st century: to make the earth a more friendly and safe living place for all human beings. The Memo already has made it's way all around the globe and it will be presented to you this evening in two different ways: by a theatre play and by some of the authors themselves.
I want to use the opportunity to express my gratitude to all of you who have joined the Rio+10-campaign of the foundation and contributed to its success. Special thanks to Joerg Haas, the coordinator of the programme, who did a great job in the last two years, and to Stefan Cramer and his Jo'burg-office team for their fine preparation and their impressing hospitality.
Let me make some short remarks on the aims and expectations we have for this global summit and the political frame of our own activities.
1. Taking stock of developments since the last summit in Rio 1992, which spread the term "sustainable development" all over the world, leads to a quite contradictory picture. On the one hand, the spirit of Rio stimulated a number of successful political processes on different level. Many thousands of local agenda 21-initiatives over all continents engaged in improving local living conditions and changing patterns of municipal development.
A number of national parliaments and governments increased environmental legislation and established medium-term-programmes for sustainable development. In particular Germany managed to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions during the last years for 19% related to 1990.
New multilateral agreements and bodies have been negotiated and partly set in force - Klaus Toepfer, head of UNEP, remembered yesterday, that meanwhile more than 300 multilateral treaties and protocols on environmental issues are part of international law.
We can even see positive trends in the corporate world: a growing number of enterprises are incorporating environmental rules and accounts in their business model, and this is not all about "greenwash", using environmental records for marketing purposes alone. New labels for sustainably produced goods (and services) have found world-wide resonance like Rugmark or the Forest Stewardship Label.
In the scientific community nowadays you will hardly find serious experts who will insist that there is no man-made-climate change ongoing, threatening the living conditions of billions of people.
But in spite of that progress, which we should register and celebrate as our common success, the decline of global ecosystems went on dramatically during the last decade. The gulf between the world’s rich and the world’s poor has ever grown, while trade multiplied and economic growth rates have been extraordinary for Northern countries. So something must be deeply wrong with today’s trade system and economic growth - and it is poor therapy just to demand more of the same in the future.
In fact, it is a key reason for the deficient social and environmental account of the last decade, that the Rio-process was undermined by another, much more powerful and dynamic process: globalisation in terms of deregulating markets has trumped over global sustainable governance. This is where we have to insist on change. The new agenda of international politics is to reshape globalisation: how can global trade and investment be embedded in an environmental and social framework on the global, national and local level? Whatever the concrete answers and solutions may be, we need a redistribution of power between corporations and communities, binding rules and effective supranational institutions, who must be empowered to both limit the markets and to steer them in a sustainable direction.
The growing tensions between globalisation and sustainability are the hidden agenda of the Jo’burg Summit. I don’t expect a fundamental change, but at least this summit must secure that multilateral agreements on environment and social protection cannot be undermined by the WTO.
2. Even if we lower our expectations: this summit will be an lacmus test on multilateral policy, on the ability of governments to strengthen cooperation, to establish global rules which allow to deal with global problems and to fulfil their obligations raising from supranational treaties.
We all know that we are in a critical moment. There are enough reasons to be concerned, whether multilateral agreements will be overrun by unilateral arrogance and national egoism (and that’s not only a problem of the US).
I hope that the European Union can play an important role as defender of multilateral action, because the EU itself is a model of regional co-operation and supranational integration. There are enough critical points in EU policies, but it has managed to combine a transnational market with common legislation and common institutions, and this is a much more promising model than highlighting national sovereignty as the basic principle of international politics.
3. Ten years after Rio, when the industrialised states failed to fulfil their promises, any positive outcome of this summit depends on rebuilding trust between the prosperous and powerful states and the developing countries. Trust will only grow if the industrialised world is ready for a combined effort to overcome social degradation as well as over-exploitation of natural resources. Protection of the ecosystems and improvement of the living conditions of billions of people are just two sides of the same coin.
Without concrete, substantial progress on fields like access to clean water and energy, market access for the developing countries and phasing out export subsidies in the OECD-countries, new mechanisms to raise money for sustainable development, alleviation of the tax burden on third world countries there will be no common sense on making development sustainable. It is true, that North and South have a common responsibility for the global commons, but it is no less true that the industrialised countries have to take a major share to turn things into a sustainable future. It’s on us in the rich parts of the world to reduce our over-consumption of resources to give the developing countries space for their industrial and social progress, so the Jo’burg-Memo is right when it says, that it makes little sense to talk about poverty alleviation without talking about wealth alleviation.
We don’t need another general declaration on sustainable development, ceremonious declared by the heads of states. What we need and expect from the summit are firm commitments, how these aims and objectives should be reached, which have been already confirmed in lots of conferences and agreements. We need concrete targets, timetables and funding, monitoring and auditing, responsible institutions which can serve as care-takers on the long way in a sustainable future.
4. Since September 11th, sustainability also has been dominated by the security agenda. I just want to say what should be common sense, but isn’t: on the long run, the highly but wrongly developed countries can’t get security by sophisticated weapons and military strength. There will be no security for any country in a world, where billions of people are excluded from the benefits of modernity and are forced to a daily struggle to survive. Without global justice there will be no sustainable peace. This is why sustainable development should be placed right in the center of a prospective security policy.
5. At the beginning of this new century, we are facing a double challenge: to meet the needs of a still rapidly growing world population up to 9 billion people in 2050 in a way, that will not destroy the ecosystems on which human life is depending. This giant task requires a fundamental change of production and consumption patterns, a new generation of resource-efficient technologies as well as a new spirit, a new culture of solidarity and global citizenship. We should not be too much surprised, that we didn’t reach a break-through to this new paradigm since Rio. Reconstructing our societies in a sustainable way and establishing global governance for social and environmental justice is a long march, not a sprint.
Ralf Fücks is a member of the executive board of the Heinrich Böll Foundation since 1996. He is a regular contributor to numerous newspapers and political periodicals and co-author to numerous books.