This month, representatives from a majority of the world's nations and many non-governmental organizations will gather in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. This is the first such meeting to be held since the first world summit, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, and it has therefore been dubbed "the second world summit" or "Rio + 10."
At the time of the first summit, most people were concerned about the destruction of the global environment and filled with expectations for the opportunities offered by this first joint global effort. Ten years on, however, it seems the expectations of most people have come to nothing, since most evidence shows that the global environment has continued to deteriorate over the past 10 years.
Over the past 20 years, there have been many warnings in the media that issues such as deforestation, global warming, environmental pollution and population growth in developing countries are the major causes of the destruction of biohabitats and biological extinction. These are all issues that we were very clear on long before the Rio summit, but we appear to have become immune and numb to such news.
What's more, this kind of information has not only been unable to point out the true causes behind these issues, but sometimes it even misdirects our recognition of these issues. For example, pointing out how lumber companies cause biohabitats to shrink by their continued deforestation in parts of Eastern Europe and Africa without discussing what the relationship is between these activities and the timber and paper we use, and even the beef we eat, simply creates an impression that those lumber companies are at it again, continuing their destruction. In this way, our daily activities and consumption are never examined, and so we never feel as though we need to make any adjustments to our daily lives.
The rapid population growth of developing countries is repeatedly reported and distorted in the same way. First of all, the reasons why the population in these areas continues to increase so rapidly has never been seriously discussed in the media. Secondly, this kind of information has created the erroneous impression that the large populations in developing countries are the main cause of environmental destruction and biological extinction.
Many studies, however, have found that poverty is the main reason for rapid population growth. At the same time, even though the population growth rates in rich countries are low, their average lifestyles consume several dozen of times more resources than do the lifestyles of populations in poorer areas. Rich countries also create more of many kinds of waste, and therefore much more destructive than people in developing countries with rapid population growth.
All the above issues were discussed at the Rio summit, which concluded that improvement of the uneven global distribution of wealth and changes to the lifestyles of people in the rich areas are the two crucial factors in the improvement of the global environment.
Over the past decade, however, we have not seen any of these necessary changes, but instead we have seen an even larger concentration of wealth, including the appearance of many extremely rich American capitalists, while we still see no improvements to the problems of poverty and hunger in developing countries.
The crux of the problem is, in fact, the above-mentioned conclusion from the Rio summit, which came to nothing more than slogans for moral persuasion without any real binding power whatsoever. We only have to make a comparison with the WTO agreement which was signed during the same period to see clearly that only global agreements regarding wealth accumulation are given serious treatment, since these agreements are supported by legislation and punishments. But agreements such as "Agenda 21," which deals with the health of the global environment and which was signed at the Rio summit, the agreements on global climate change and the Convention on Biological Diversity are all non-binding agreements.
Looking ahead to this second World Summit on Sustainable Development, therefore, we expect representatives from various countries to discuss and criticize the lack of global efforts in the area of environmental protection over the past decade.
We also hope that the summit will create a treaty with real regulatory power when it comes to world poverty, the uneven global distribution of wealth and various root causes of environmental destruction.
If this does not happen, we will still hear warnings about biological extinction 10 years from now, and we will also continue to remain cold to this kind of news.
Chi Chun-chieh is an associate professor at the Institute of Ethnic Relations at National Dong-Hwa University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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