Will countries heed Clinton's call for more action on SLCPs? AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano

by Rebecca Lefton

Despite the flop in the official negotiations, Rio+20 stimulated many new commitments and reinvigorated international conversations about how to redirect growth in a more sustainable manner.

Governments, business leaders, and civil society demonstrated new models for innovative partnerships for addressing sustainable development and emphasized alternative approaches to solving global threat of climate change.  The Climate and Clean Air Coalition is an excellent example of such an approach.

The Climate and Clean Air Coalition brings together partners to apply already-existing solutions to cut short-lived climate pollutants that will cut in half the rate of global warming in the near-term. Short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) — such as black carbon, soot, methane, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and tropospheric ozone — are shorter lived than carbon dioxide, but much more potent and account for around one-third of global warming. Some of these potent greenhouse gases are deadly: Each year millions of people die prematurely and more are diagnosed from a high incidence of dangerous respiratory disease.  They also accelerate melting of the Arctic and are responsible for extensive crop losses each year.

US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson provided an update on the CCAC during the Rio conference as an example of a multilateral effort toward sustainability.

“The Climate and Clean Air Coalition is driven by the potential to do great things for our environment, our health and economy and make sure we are taking advantage in cost-effective solutions … especially in disproportionately impacted areas where solutions are needed,” said Jackson.

The coalition has nearly tripled in size from an initial 6 countries to 16 members since the launch in Washington four months ago — including all G8 members, plus the European Commission, United Nations Environment Program, and the World Bank.

“This is not a talk shop, not a treaty organization, not a place where we are tying to negotiate a treaty. This is a place where we are doing things,” said Todd Stern, US Special Envoy for Climate Change, speaking at Rio+20.

The CCAC is already advancing concrete results and initiatives.  Last week in Rio the CCAC supported the launch of a learning network to help local governments reduce methane from solid waste management in partnership with the C40 and The World Bank.  Waste is one of the largest sources of methane emissions in the world.

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Protesters at Rio+20 lament the weak negotiated text. Photo: Youthpolicy.org

As the crowds at the Rio+20 Earth Summit dwindled and attendees left the conference hall late in the day Friday, a small group of people sat around a lunch table in the cafeteria engaged in spirited conversation.

They weren’t talking about the failed negotiations. They weren’t complaining about diplomats, the UN process, or the lack of a strong agreement at the summit. Rather, they were debating the barriers faced by entrepreneurs delivering solar to under-served populations in India.

The group consisted of Carl Pope, former executive director of the Sierra Club; Jigar Shah, former CEO of the Carbon War Room; Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO of Eight19, a company developing an off-grid solar lighting and battery system; and Mayank Sekhsaria, co-founder of Greenlight Planet, a firm helping entrepreneurs deploy off-grid solar technologies in India.

“What people don’t understand is that this isn’t about demand for solar, it’s about supply. If you could theoretically service these markets all at once, you’d solve the problem immediately,” said Sekhsaria, describing the different deployment bottlenecks within the off-grid Indian market.

Over the next hour, as world leaders projected on the large television screen at the front of the cafeteria spoke about the need to address the world’s environmental problems, these experts debated the real, on-the-ground problems for the solar industry in the developing world.

For many, the Rio+20 Earth Summit will go down as one of the greatest diplomatic failures of our time — a squandered opportunity for the international community to take real action on our looming environmental problems. But for some attendees, the negotiations are only a small piece of what’s really going on.

“I’m not here following the different funding commitments or the text, I’m here to meet people and talk about solar and connect with new people all over the world,” said Sekhsaria.

This is the other side of Rio+20. The summit is usually billed as place where negotiators come to hammer out broad agreements in stuffy rooms. And that’s what a lot of attendees are focused on. But with more than 45,000 people attending hundreds of side events on every sustainability subject imaginable, it’s also a place where people come to learn from one another.

“Unfortunately, what people focus on are the negotiations,” said Jacob Scherr, director of global strategy and advocacy for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But that part of the meeting is a remnant of the 20th century. What we see now are mayors, governors, activists and civil society groups all participating and creating new coalitions. To me that’s the value.”

Scherr, like every other representative of the environmental community, is deeply disappointed in the outcome of the official negotiations.

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A penny for your cyber-thoughts.

NOTE: How about crowd-sourcing some real pennies for cartoonist, Stephanie McMillan, who has given me permission to reprint her cartoons. Here’s the link to Paypal: CLICK HERE (then click where it says DONATE).

Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at the Rio+20 summit

by Adam James, Andrew Light, and Gwynne Taraska

The final draft text of the Rio+20 Earth Summit agreed on today has disappointed many delegates and activists around the world. Other than the Brazilian chair of the meeting, no one seems to be strongly defending the document.

The World Wildlife Fund has declared the text “a colossal failure of leadership and vision.”  Ida Auken, the Danish Environment Minister and Chair of the European Environment Council, remarked that “the EU would have liked to see a much more concrete and ambitious outcome, so in that respect I’m not happy with it.” Even Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, said that he had hoped for a more “ambitious” outcome, though he quickly added that we should understand the difficulty has been over resolving “conflicting interests” among the parties.

Some of this criticism could be overwrought.  Unlike the first Rio Earth Summit 20 years ago, this meeting never aimed to produce a new international treaty or a process that would lead to an international agreement.  From the start, its most ambitious aim was to create a set of Sustainable Development Goals that would replace the Millennium Development Goals, which were agreed to in New York City in 2000 and are set to expire in 2015.  Given the conflicting interests identified by Moon, it is impressive that the parties were able to go on the record supporting as many progressive changes in the development and environment agenda that they did.  But while the current Rio text acknowledges (and occasionally even underlines, underscores, and stresses) that action on sustainable development and climate change is urgently needed, it is deficient in specific goals, details on how to achieve them, and target dates.

Some, like former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth, President of the U.N. Foundation, reply that we shouldn’t focus on the text as much as we should focus on the public-private partnerships that are being announced at the meeting around initiatives such as Moon’s Sustainable Energy For All initiative, which has drawn $2 billion in support from the U.S.

Wirth has a good point.  At this moment, there may be no need to wrangle further over why the Rio text is as weak as it is. Instead, we should move on to make these newly emerging institutions of international cooperation work as well as they can.  In the end, what was produced at Rio looks much more like a G20 text, simply articulating the lowest common denominator among the parties.  While activists may have hoped for more, this could be the best we could hope for in this kind of process when an actual treaty is not on the table.

Still, there are some interesting lessons to be learned here from how this text went wrong.  If we go back and look at the development of the Rio text, we can see that it could have been bolder if some parties had been allowed to strengthen it.

The Evolution of the Text

We compared the current final text in Rio with the text as it had been negotiated up to June 2^nd.  We chose the June 2^nd version because it still identified requests by parties to put in or take out language from the document.  Parties at the time were half-way through a two-week long meeting at the UN in New York during the third round of informal negotiations to draft a text. In contrast, the final draft from earlier this week is a text determined by the Brazilian chair of the meeting to be the best compromise between the competing interests of the parties.

Our main conclusion is that while responsibility for this final text now rests with all the assembled parties in Rio, the chair of the meeting could have pushed harder on the parties to produce a more ambitious text by negotiating throughout the week.  Instead, the pattern seems to be one of eliminating any disagreement on any item, which resulted in a joint declaration now charged with failing to provide adequate targets, timelines, or guidelines for achieving any of its aspirations.

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by Gwynne Taraska

Ban Ki-moon’s initiative “Sustainable Energy for All” (SE4ALL) did not receive a strong endorsement in the final draft of the Rio+20 declaration.  It should have.  Nevertheless, SE4ALL leaves the summit with something that is arguably better: strong support from governments, the private sector, multilateral development banks, and civil society groups.  We should continue to support the initiative so that it survives – and thrives – after the summit.

About SE4ALL

SE4ALL, led by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, has three objectives to be achieved by 2030.

1. Ensure universal access to modern energy services.

2. Double the global rate of improvement in energy efficiency.

3. Double the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix.

The initiative’s High Level Group, chaired by Kandeh Yumkella (Director-General of the UN Industrial Development Organization) and Charles Holliday (Chairman of Bank of America), has produced a Global Action Agenda to “to guide efforts undertaken in support of achieving the initiative’s three objectives.” Secretary of Energy Steven Chu is the U.S. representative to the group.

Ban Ki-moon labored for months to put SE4ALL at the center of the Rio agenda.  The strategy made sense.  Rio was the biggest sustainable development event on the global agenda in the last ten years, and it possibly won’t be duplicated for another ten years.  It was the optimal moment to call the world’s attention to the problem of energy poverty.  It’s impossible to imagine a fair and effective distribution of global climate mitigation that would be acceptable to the developing world without a robust companion sustainable development agenda.  Ban Ki-moon’s process therefore fills a needed gap in the global effort to reconcile climate and development needs.

Unfortunately, SE4ALL didn’t get much support from the Rio text.  In the one paragraph on the initiative, the three specific objectives and target date are not mentioned.  The paragraph even provides an out to parties who won’t be able to meet its goals, or who won’t try to accomplish them.

129. We note the launching of the initiative by the Secretary General on “Sustainable Energy for All”, which focus on access to energy, energy efficiency and renewable energies. We are all determined to act to make sustainable energy for all a reality, and through this, help eradicate poverty and lead to sustainable development and global prosperity. We recognize that countries’ activities in broader energy-related issues are of great importance and are prioritized according to their specific challenges, capacities and circumstances, including energy mix.

SE4ALL Beyond Rio+20

The good news is that the success of SE4ALL does not rely on the Rio text.  In fact, the initiative received an impressive boost from many parties at the summit.

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As world leaders arrived for the Rio+20 Earth Summit earlier this week, the skies began to darken over Rio de Janeiro — a sign of how attendees were feeling after negotiators presented a watered-down document on Tuesday night outlining global sustainability aspirations.

When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton landed in Rio early this morning, she arrived amidst a torrential rainstorm that soaked the streets of the city. And that’s about how many people were feeling as the conference neared a close today: a little soaked.

In an effort to break the clouds and show that the U.S. has done something other than commit to weak aspirational goals, Clinton was in Rio today to announce a new U.S. initiative to leverage private financing for clean energy projects in Africa. The partnership, which includes the State Department, the Overseas Private Investment Corp., and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, will provide $20 million in grants to business owners in Africa to help leverage hundreds of millions in private financing.

“This initiative is part of an across the board push to make clean energy and energy security cornerstones of our foreign policy,” said Clinton, speaking at a side event before her speech to the full conference.

Clinton then highlighted other key initiatives supported by the U.S., including a partnership with Brazil on developing sustainable cities, an international program to stop deforestation, and $2 billion in commitments to the UN’s Sustainable Energy For All program.

While environmental groups have been very critical of the formal negotiated outcome in Rio, the announcement from Clinton received some cautious praise.

“This is a positive step for leveraging scarce resources to deliver clean energy access for the poor. I’m more than happy to see Secretary Clinton putting her weight behind these kinds of initiatives,” said Justin Guay, head of the Sierra Club’s international program.

Some of the public and private commitments made in Rio are older and have been re-packaged for the summit, making groups watching the pledges skeptical. But this is a new program, said Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“This will help unleash the large potential for renewable energy that exists in Africa. This proves that renewable energy is ready in all continents as it expands OPIC investment into a continent in desperate need of renewable energy to help address energy poverty and the growing energy needs in key African countries,” said Schmidt.

After leaving the side event, Clinton moved to the plenary where she addressed the entire summit and again highlighted “targeted action” supported by the U.S. in an attempt to weave a positive message. She made no mention of the sense of disappointment about the negotiated text coming out of the conference.

But others were more blunt about the overall outcome.

“Opportunities to bring together political leaders in this context happen so rarely, this summit is correctly perceived as a missed opportunity,” said Manish Bapna, executive vice president of the World Resources Institute, speaking about the official document coming out of Rio.

Bapna said he was excited to see new initiatives coming out of Rio like the one announced by Clinton today. But he lamented that the official document from the summit has “few deadlines, few numbers, with very little that is truly concrete.”

Stephen Lacey is reporting from Rio this week. For a full wrap up of the conference, stay tuned to Climate Progress.

by Durwood Zaelke and Andrew Light, via The Hill

For the rest of this week over 100 global leaders, and more countries, converge on Rio de Janeiro for the Rio+20 Earth Summit. As of Tuesday a negotiated text was released which so far is receiving dismal reviews as watered down and lacking in any concrete commitments or timetables for outcomes. If the meeting is considered a failure, or results only in a laundry list of promises, who is to blame? Can anything be done to salvage this global opportunity?

Already the finger pointing has begun. Some are blaming the leaders who didn’t attend, including President Obama, Chancellor Merkel of Germany, and Prime Minister Cameron of the U.K. Others are blaming Ban Ki-moon and the U.N. establishment for not pushing harder on an aggressive agenda. And many others will fault the Brazilians, who as the host, have relatively greater authority at the meeting and shaped the final negotiated text.

While other parties can comfortably deny their responsibility for one reason or another, Brazil is stuck. Like the Danes, who hosted a critical U.N. climate summit in 2009 that didn’t live up to expectations – whether it’s reasonable or not to blame them – Brazil will be forever saddled with the perception of this week’s outcome.

However the outcome of this meeting is eventually received, the truth is Brazil likely wasn’t able to get anything out of the meeting that the parties weren’t prepared to do. But they could show clearer leadership this week by reversing their position on the single biggest action that could be taken today to reduce greenhouse pollutants and cut in half the rate of global warming for the next 30 to 40 years.

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A sign at the Rio+20 summit.

by Gwynne Taraska and Stephen Lacey

The lack of ambition in the final draft text at the Rio+20 Earth Summit has made many people upset, even outraged. Although it acknowledges (and occasionally even underlines and stresses) that action on sustainable development is urgently needed, it imposes no timelines and provides few details on how to achieve its goals.

But there’s a lot going on at Rio outside of the negotiations, with side events and business meetings resulting in new announcements for public and private actions on addressing climate, energy and water issues.

For example, on Monday, 59 of the world’s largest cities formed a coalition to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 248 million tons by 2020

“We’re not arguing with each other about emissions targets,” said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg at an event announcing the initiative.

And yesterday, the world’s largest multi-lateral development banks agreed to put $175 billion toward sustainable transportation in developing countries over the next decade.

Numerous corporations have also made voluntary commitments that include target dates. Some of those — like Microsoft’s pledge to become carbon nuetral — have been re-packaged for the Rio+20 summit. But there are plenty of new announcements as well. Below, we outline some of the key corporate commitments being made in Rio.

Background

The UN Global Compact, together with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and WWF International, has called for corporate commitments to advance the issues of its Rio+20 Corporate Sustainability Forum.  These include Energy and Climate, Water and Ecosystems, Agriculture and Food, Social Development, Urbanization and Cities, and the Economics and Finance of Sustainable Development.

The forum, held in the lead up to the Rio summit, emphasized recent corporate commitments and private-public collaborations. According to the Executive Summary of the forum, there were approximately “200 commitments to action announced by companies during the Forum, representing both individual and collective actions, in social, economic and environmental areas.” The commitments will be cataloged in the Rio+20 Corporate Sustainability Forum Overview, which is set to be released 21 June 2012. Here are some selected pledges that businesses have made through the Global Compact.

Climate

Microsoft Corporation has committed to be carbon neutral by the end of FY2013.  It plans to reach net zero carbon emissions via offsets and has pledged to partner with government and non-government organizations on renewable energy projects.

Unilever has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions associated with its products in half by 2020.

Nike has pledged to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% by FY2015. It also has committed to cut water use by increasing efficiency (15% per unit) and to stop discharging hazardous chemicals by 2020.

Bank of America has pledged $50 billion by 2022 for initiatives on energy efficiency, energy access, and renewable energy.

By 2020, ArcelorMittal has committed to reducing carbon emissions by 8% for each ton of steel it produces.

Procter and Gamble’s sustainability goals for 2020 including meeting 30% of the energy needs of its plants with renewable energy and replacing a quarter of its petroleum-based materials with renewable materials.

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UN Women Head Michelle Bachelet. Photo: Martin Lerberg Foss

by Rebecca Lefton

Rio +20, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, is renewing international conversations about how to simultaneously address poverty, protect the environment, and maintain balanced economic growth.  If progress is to be made, the agenda must reflect that achieving gender equality is intimately tied to achieving these other goals, as well as being a goal in and of itself.  But as current negotiations stand, Rio risks losing an opportunity to embrace and strengthen the link between women’s rights and gender equality and sustainable development

A draft agreement was reached on Tuesday after lengthy and painstaking negotiations. But many are disappointed, including those who support women’s equality.  Country negotiators have been working over the last several months to complete an agreement to bring before official high-level negotiations that began on June 20. In the process the text ballooned from an original 19 page document to hundreds of pages. But yesterday’s slimmed down version of 49 pages represents the lowest common denominator. Appallingly, women’s reproductive rights and references to gender equality were a casualty.

The United States, Norway, and women’s NGOs that organized through the Women’s Major Group fought hard to include language ensuring reproductive rights for women and affirming gender equality in the Rio text. However, the Holy See (the Vatican) led an opposition that ultimately prevailed in removing key sections for gender equality in the text.  The result is that language ensuring reproductive rights were completely dropped from the text.

As the language from an earlier version of the text dated June 2 shows, the Group of 77 — a negotiating bloc of developing countries known as the G77 — and the Holy See opposed the inclusion of language ensuring women’s reproductive rights.  The final text only commits to promote rather than ensure equal access of women to health care, education, basic services and economic opportunities. And the reference to women’s reproductive rights was deleted in the draft agreement.

June 2 text:

We are committed to ensure the equal access of women and girls to education, basic services, economic opportunities and health care services, including addressing women’s sexual and reproductive health [and their reproductive rights, – G77 reserves] and ensuring universal access to safe, effective, affordable and acceptable modern methods of family planning. In this regard, we reaffirm our commitment to fully implement the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the key actions for the further implementation of the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development. [Holy See reserve]

Draft agreement text:

241. We are committed to promote the equal access of women and girls to education, basic services, economic opportunities and health care services, including addressing women’s sexual and reproductive health, and ensuring universal access to safe, effective, affordable and acceptable modern methods of family planning. In this regard, we reaffirm our commitment to implement the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the key actions for the further implementation of the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development.

The Holy See is a non-member-state permanent member of the United Nations that has been influential in equating women’s reproductive rights with abortion in Rio conversations.  “The Holy See has made many delegations argue that reproductive rights and health is code word for abortion. It is not never has been,” said Gita Sen, Executive Committee, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, during a briefing in response to the text.

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World leaders are calling for new ways of measuring progress on sustainability at Rio+20

Gross Domestic Product is the crack-cocaine of economic indicators. It’s a simple concept, it’s easy for politicians and the media to recite, and it fits in perfectly with society’s single-minded obsession with growth — no matter what the consequences.

It’s time to stop that addiction, say world leaders.

“GDP has always had its limitations. Progress needs to be defined in a way which accounts for the broader picture of human development,” said Helen Clark, administrator of the UN Development Program, speaking at a side event at the Rio+20 summit today.

She was joined by a group of heavy hitters, including Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Zambia’s President Michael Chilufya Sata, former OECD Chief Statistician Enrico Giovannini, and World Bank Environment Program Head Mary Barton-Dock — all of whom called for an end to our overreliance on GDP.

GDP simply measures the volume of economic activity in a given economy. The higher the GDP, supposedly the higher the quality of life. But because it equally values all economic activity — good, bad, and disastrous — it’s a woefully inadequate tool for gauging human and environmental progress.

In 1968, Robert Kennedy made one of the most famous and oft-quoted statements on the limitations of the metric:

“The Gross National Product includes air pollution, and ambulances to clear our highways from carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads.”

The chart below, one of many put together by Demos, is a stark illustration of why GDP is such a poor measurement tool. As economic output has increased in the U.S., our biocapacity — the availability of natural resources — has fallen in tandem. If looking at the brown line in a narrow context, all is well. When considering the environmental impact of that growth, clearly we have a problem:

For decades, those concerned about sustainability have struggled to make innovative methods of measuring human and environmental well-being stick in the international zeitgeist. But they’ve only had limited success.

It’s not like there aren’t any options. Economists and statisticians have developed plenty of alternatives to measuring social and environmental health over the years. In 1992, the United Nations adopted the Human Development Index developed by Pakastani economist Mahbub ul Haq. It’s the most well-known alternative. However, while it’s been widely used by the UN and has been somewhat effective in challenging traditional ways of thinking, it still hasn’t sparked a major shift away from countries’ addiction to GDP.

So leaders are using this year’s Earth Summit to try to change the dialogue. Today they announced plans to craft a new index through the UN’s Human Development Report Office that would track the cost of human development on future generations, rather than just use the current Human Development Index to track current well-being. It’s the UN’s version 2.0.

But fleshing out that new model is complicated. The UNDP’s Helen Clark expressed the difficulties in establishing a new set of metrics: “What should be measured? And what indicators could be used? What are overriding principles? What do policymakers need to know?”

Answering those questions becomes more difficult the deeper you want to go. The World Bank’s Mary Barton Dock provided a fantastic example of how complicated it can be valuing natural capital.

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