Associated Press

by Maggie L. Fox

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, the pivotal 1992 event that put climate change on the international map. The theme of this year’s Rio+20 summit is sustainable development  — economic growth that sustains us in the present without placing the lives and welfare of future generations in jeopardy.

Many of the most daunting and important challenges of the 21st century are the subjects of debate and negotiation at the Summit: How we create and use energy, confront global climate change, and adjust to a rapidly growing population.

Yes, these are huge challenges, but in the last 20 years we have learned one clear and resounding truth: that a commitment to protect the rights of women and young people around the world is a critical step toward a sustainable future.

There are 200 million women in the world who want to use contraception to prevent pregnancy, but don’t have access to these basic services. Access to integrated reproductive health services for all is essential — including maternity care and safe, effective, affordable and acceptable modern methods of contraception. By reducing maternal and child mortality and improving the health of women, these health services have a powerful impact on sustainable development.

Access to modern birth control isn’t a side issue — we truly can’t have sustainable development without it. Empowering women creates a positive ripple effect — creating healthy and more prosperous families and communities, slowing population growth, and helping restore the balance between people and the air, land and water we all depend upon for life.

In so doing, we will also dramatically slow the growth of dangerous greenhouse gas emissions — to the same degree as if we increased the world’s reliance on wind power dramatically, scaled up the efficiency of buildings and vehicles, or made huge strides in reducing deforestation. Now that’s a huge win for women, families and for the planet.

We are also too far behind in ensuring access to comprehensive sexuality education. An essential, powerful impact of the Rio+20 negotiations would be to affirm the human rights of women, men and adolescents to make decisions related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free from coercion, discrimination and violence.

But isn’t that too controversial to make progress on now? No, because despite the recent dustups in the United States, public opinion polls consistently show that the vast majority of Americans believe family planning is essential and support open access to contraception here and abroad.

Rio+20 presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to ensure that women’s health, reproductive rights, and sexuality education are recognized and incorporated in our vision of and an action plan for our shared sustainable future. This is the moment to transform the human side of sustainable development into reality.

Maggie L. Fox is the President and CEO, The Climate Reality Project. Since joining ACP in 2009, Maggie has led a campaign to help citizens around the world discover the truth about the climate crisis and take meaningful steps to bring about change. She is a veteran of numerous political, environmental and national issue campaigns, and has over 30 years of experience mobilizing people to work for progressive change.

It was too perfect. And sad. On my way to see experts at Rio+20 speak about the growing waste problem in the developing world, I watched a man on his cell phone walk up to a recycling bin and dump his trash in the wrong receptacle. He walked off without even realizing what he had done.

It perfectly encapsulated the challenge. If people with access to proper recycling and waste management services aren’t using them properly, what about countries without those services?

According to experts at Rio+20, the problem is far greater than the international community is recognizing. With global municipal solid waste set to double in by 2025 — mostly in developing countries without the capabilities to manage that waste — many say it’s one of the most pressing environmental problems of our time.

“We are creating an environmental disaster that developing countries are ignoring at their own peril,” said David Newman, a board member with the International Solid Waste Association.

Less than half the world’s population has access to proper waste disposal, causing mountains of hazardous trash — including a growing amount of e-waste — to pile up. By 2020, e-waste from consumer electronics will jump 500% in some countries. That’s causing toxic chemicals to leach into groundwater and putting a financial burden on economically-constrained countries.

The United Nations has identified waste reduction strategies as a key part of its sustainable development goals. Chemical and municipal waste is mentioned frequently in the draft text that negotiators are putting together at Rio+20.

We recognize the importance of adopting a life-cycle approach and of further development and implementation of policies for resource efficiency and environmentally sound waste management. We therefore commit to further reduce, reuse and recycle waste (3Rs) as well as to increase energy recovery from waste with a view to managing the majority of global waste in an environmentally sound manner and where possible as a resource. Solid wastes, such as electronic waste and plastics, pose particular challenges which should be addressed. We call for the development and enforcement of comprehensive national and local waste management policies, strategies, laws and regulations.

While the text “recognizes” the solid waste problem and urges action through existing conventions, Newman says the international aid community doesn’t seem to be focused on the scale of the problem.

According to him, 0.25 percent of all development aid goes to helping with waste disposal strategies, or less than $400 million per year. “It’s nothing,” says Newman. “We have to raise the profile of this emergency on the international agenda. The consequences of doing nothing are disastrous.”

The World Bank issued a report on urban waste in March, finding that waste is cities around the world would grow by 100 percent by 2025. However, developing countries would face the greatest burden — with five-fold cost increases expected.

All that waste has more than just local environmental consequences. Waste disposal is responsible for 12 percent of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period. With global waste streams set to double — more than two thirds of which will not be recycled — the global environmental consequences are stark.

“It’s madness. We’re on a downward resource spiral, yet we fail to recover 70 percent of the resources we consume. Are we crazy?” asked Newman.

Maybe that question is better asked of the man who dumped his tray of trash into the recycling bin at a global sustainability conference.

Stephen Lacey is reporting from Rio this week.

What will history say about Brazil's job hosting the Rio+20 summit? Photo: Stephen Lacey

World leaders are set to convene at the Rio+20 Earth Summit tomorrow to begin high-level negotiations on a global sustainability framework. But if the reaction from civil society groups to the draft text is any indication, the negotiations will be all style and very little substance.

After working through the night on Monday, international negotiators agreed on a framework for “sustainable development goals” that could help guide a wide-range of policies on issues like poverty eradication, clean energy deployment, sustainable cities, and fisheries management. But with very few specifics on how to actually implement these sustainability goals, the text has angered almost every single civil society group observing the negotiations.

“The overall response from the NGO community to the negotiations is one of alarm and concern,” said Jeffrey Huffines, a representative for Non-Governmental Organizations to the United Nations. “Our concern is that the means of implementation are not clearly articulated.”

In other words, there’s very little in the text that would get us from here to there.

Civil society groups are expressing concern about almost every issue in the draft agreement. Leaders representing labor, agriculture, women’s rights, science & technology, local governments, and indigenous peoples all raised serious concerns today about the watered down text.

“There are a some things that are strengthened like the role of social protection and the mention of green jobs. But the document is not really ambitious in terms of implementation,” said Annabel Rosemberg, the Environment Coordinator with the International Trade Union Confederation.”

“We are deeply disappointed,” said Gita Sen, a founding member of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era. Sen lamented that much of the language on women’s rights had been stripped from the text, calling it a “war on the human rights of women.”

“There’s a lack of detail,” said Andre Leu, President of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. “But for us, the document is a starting point for what happens afterward.”

The text might be a start for some. But with almost every portion of the document watered down to be politically acceptable, most civil society groups fear that it does very little to establish any concrete end goals.

Even the UN’s hallmark program for addressing energy poverty, Sustainable Energy For All, has taken a hit. The initiative, which would require roughly $50 billion in public and private-sector commitments per year, was designed to eradicate energy poverty by 2030. However, the new text gives countries plenty of room to wiggle out of any commitments:

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.

Compare that to the old working text from June 2nd, which created a road map for a multilateral process to actually realize the program’s goals:

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Stephen Lacey is reporting from Rio this week.

If the 1992 Rio Earth Summit was a symbol of political solidarity in a post Cold War world, then the 2012 Rio+20 Earth Summit is a symbol of the current fragmentation in the geopolitical landscape.

As the world’s leading economies struggle with deep fiscal troubles, an emerging group of developing countries gains more power on the international stage, and citizen activists use the power of distributed social media to influence the negotiations, the structure — and therefore the outcome — of the Rio+20 summit will be fundamentally different.

And the definition of a successful meeting is largely determined by where one sits on this spectrum.

For diplomats hammering out text around the negotiating table, establishing a new framework for sustainable development goals — no matter how watered down — may be seen as a success. To the emerging economies still worried about fairness in any international agreement, the inclusion of “common but differentiated responsibilities” is crucial to any final product. To civil servants and business leaders working on the ground, establishing clear policy goals for deploying clean energy and sharing best practices is the key. And to the activists attempting to put pressure on negotiators, only strong language explicitly calling for an end to fossil fuel subsidies would be seen as a win.

“You have all these worlds operating at once, and I’m not always sure how much they are talking to one another or agreeing,” said Michael Liebriech, the CEO of Bloomberg New Energy Finance in an interview with Climate Progress.

As a result, expectations for the final outcome are very low this week.

Liebriech offers the perfect example of why it’s so difficult to gauge the influence of Rio+20. As head of one of the leading firms providing information on clean energy investment trends, he’s witnessed $1 trillion pour into the sector globally since 2004.

“My clients really don’t necessarily care about what’s happening in the negotiations. They’re concerned about what’s right in front of them. What would you rather trust, a decades-long process that hasn’t resulted in a whole lot of progress, or a trillion dollars in investment?”

Two decades after the last Rio Earth Summit, a lot of people are feeling that way.

To be fair, the Millennium Development Goals established at the 1992 summit have served as a framework for many countries setting policies to promote clean energy, reduce local pollution, and establish water-access projects. But with the clean energy sector now taking on a life of its own, some are skeptical of how much an agreement in Rio will actually help the progress already underway.

“The sector is getting into an era where it’s starting to think beyond the support mechanism. It’s now about how do you grow to the next scale point. And I think the next question is about removing regulatory and financing barriers,” said Liebreich.

To do that, however, leaders need better access to information in order to learn from experienced countries. And that’s one of the major reasons for the negotiations — to set up a framework for helping the international community to realize new deployment methods for renewable energy, efficiency, water-access, and sustainable buildings.

“The most important thing that could come out of the negotiations in Rio right now are a discrete set of Sustainable Development Goals to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which will expire in 2015,” said Andrew Light, an international climate expert at the Center for American Progress.

“Though the importance of the MDGs isn’t well understood in the U.S., they’ve been important in much of the rest of the world to stimulate national policies to address these goals and to measure success. In this respect the negotiations can serve what’s actually happening on the ground now in clean technology.”

Unlike 1992, there won’t be any major framework agreement or treaty signed. Instead, the meeting is a chance to assess where we stand 20 years later, to agree on some key sustainable development goals, and to establish best practices for national implementation of clean technologies — with a central focus on harnessing bottom-up entrepreneurship to serve the 1.3 billion people without access to adequate energy.

These negotiations also play as a chess match to advance other international agreements. Because the Brazilians are under pressure to ensure the meeting doesn’t just end with a long list of watered-down promises, they could face increasing pressure to sign onto an agreement currently in the works to reduce short-lived climate pollutants like HFCs, black carbon, and methane.

So if the final text is weak, but the Brazilians agree to a framework for reducing pollutants that contribute so much to short-term global warming, is that a total failure? And if leaders can’t agree to a phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, but provide a clearer pathway to deploying the next trillion dollars of renewable energy investment, is that a failure?

There are a lot of moving parts to the Rio negotiations. The summit means a lot of things to a lot of stakeholders — a sign of the times. Clearly, Rio+20 is another step on a long, complicated road to realizing a more sustainable society, not an end goal in itself. And no one should be expecting it to play that role.

Eutrophication&hypoxia, via Flickr

by Jamie Henn, via The Huffington Post

How can world leaders at the Rio+20 Earth Summit next week show that they are serious about sustainable development and environmental protection? The answer is simple: end fossil fuel subsidies.

Every year, governments around the world give nearly $1 trillion dollars of public money to the fossil fuel industry. Three years ago, the G20 committed to phase-out these handouts to coal, oil and gas companies, but they haven’t taken any action since.

Now is the perfect time. This June 18, finance ministers and heads of state from G20 countries will come together in Los Cabos, Mexico. Three days later, more than 100 presidents and prime ministers will join over 50,000 people at the Rio+20 Earth Summit, the largest environmental conference in world history. Both meetings offer a clear opportunity for world leaders to step up to the plate and stop these outrageous handouts.

After all, how can you have a serious discussion about funding sustainable development without taking on the hundreds of billions of dollars handed over to the fossil fuel sector each year? A mere fraction of these subsidies could jumpstart thousands of clean energy projects around the world. Large scale transfers of money from dirty to clean investments could catalyze the type of worldwide energy transformation that is desperately needed.

It’s still unclear if leaders will take the type of bold action necessary, but the push to end fossil fuel subsidies is gaining momentum around the world. On June 18, a dozen major groups — from World Wildlife Fund to Avaaz — are taking part in a 24-hour “Twitter Storm” to try and flood the online airwaves with the #endfossilfuelsubsidies hashtag. The coalition may even be within striking distance of taking down Justin Bieber’s twitter world record for the most tweets on a single hashtag.

The slogan for the Rio+20 meetings is, “The Future We Want.” By next week, we’ll know if our politicians have lived up to that promise or once again bought into “The Future Exxon Wants,” a world where our tax dollars continue to get sucked up by the world’s richest corporations so that they can continue to profit from destroying the planet.

Jamie Henn is the Co-founder and Communications Director at 350.0rg. This piece was originally published at The Huffington Post and was reprinted with permission.

by Andrew Light and Rebecca Lefton

The Group of 20 developed and developing nations will meet Monday in Los Cabos, Mexico, for their seventh meeting since the initial G-20 summit in November 2008, hosted by the George W. Bush administration in Washington, D.C. What will be the role of climate and energy issues at this latest summit?

This is an especially intriguing question since this G-20 meeting, unlike those that came before it, starts a week that will end with the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—more commonly known as the Rio+20 Earth Summit. This once-in-a-decade event brings together thousands of participants from governments, the private sector, and civil society to focus on addressing poverty and sustainable development.

President Barack Obama will attend the G-20 meeting but not Rio+20, and other G-20 leaders are expected to make the same decision. For this and other reasons, some fear that the G-20 could upstage the Rio meeting.

But can the G-20, a relatively closed but highly influential meeting of the world’s largest economies, help set the stage for the Rio meeting, which, at this late date, is suffering from a lack of consensus on agreed goals? Yes. The best thing the G-20 leaders can do to help Rio succeed is to double down on their core climate and energy commitment—phasing out fossil-fuel subsidies—and creating a concrete roadmap to making it a reality. This will demonstrate that what the world needs now is concrete steps to real commitments instead of another series of empty proclamations.

The problem of the expanding G-20 agenda

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Severn Suzuki, the "girl who silenced the world for six minutes"

by Bill Becker

It was 20 years ago this month that Severn Suzuki, then 12, gave the speech of her life. As she stood on the podium at the first Earth Summit, facing dignitaries from 178 nations, Severn’s 6-minute statement also became the speech of her generation.

The topic was sustainable development. The place was Rio de Janeiro, where heads of state, delegates and negotiators from 178 nations assembled to consider how humankind and the rest of the natural world could co-exist, to the everlasting benefit of both.

Ten years later, Severn recalled the experience and assessed the world’s progress in a column for TIME magazine:

“I am only a child,” I told them. “Yet I know that if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this would be. In school you teach us not to fight with others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share, not be greedy. Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do? You grownups say you love us, but I challenge you, please, to make your actions reflect your words.”

I spoke for six minutes and received a standing ovation. Some of the delegates even cried. I thought that maybe I had reached some of them, that my speech might actually spur action. Now, a decade from Rio, after I’ve sat through many more conferences, I’m not sure what has been accomplished. My confidence in the people in power and in the power of an individual’s voice to reach them has been deeply shaken.

This month is the 20-year anniversary of the Earth Summit. On June 20, international negotiators and heads of state will meet again in Rio to assess progress and discuss new commitments. The theme of Rio+20, as the conference is unofficially called, is “The Future We Want” – an invocation, perhaps, of Buckminster Fuller’s admonition that “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.”

Severn’s name today is Severn Cullis-Suzuki. She is married and has her own child. If she were invited back to the podium at Rio+20, what would she say? We asked her. Green Cross International taped her answer for The Future We Want project.

Among many other points, she repeats what she told negotiators in 1992: Achieve intergenerational justice by making your actions reflect your words.

There have been many more words than actions these past 20 years. The Earth Summit produced Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, the Statement of Forest Principles, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. New institutions were created, including the Commission on Sustainable Development, the Inter-Agency Committee on Sustainable Development and the High-Level Advisory Board on Sustainable Development.

Yet in a report released last week, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) concluded that the world “continues to speed down an unsustainable path despite over 500 internationally agreed goals and objectives to support the sustainable management of the environment and improve human wellbeing.” Significant progress has been made on only four of the 90 most important commitments to sustainability, UNEP reported.

At Rio+20, about 130 heads of state and government, along with more than 50,000 leaders in business, cities and non-government groups, are expected. Among them will be thousands of young people, the Severns of today. I expect that many of them are full of hope, while others are frustrated that they are being handed a world in which security, peace, genuine prosperity, social justice and sustainability remain aspirations rather than realities. Read more