Sequels, it has oft been said, are generally disappointing. Aficionados of all stripes will gloomily concur. I’m told that the worst sequel ever (surely an accolade if ever there was one) was something gloriously called Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil. But – I’m truly sorry to report – even Z-list horror flicks have nothing on the latest follow-up catastrophe.
Twenty years ago, world leaders decamped to Rio de Janeiro for the most celebrated environmental meeting of the century. Rio 1992 is, still, something of a cult classic in environmental circles. It also spawned an alphabet soup of acronyms: from the CBD and the IPF to the RDED and the UNFCCC, it finally felt like the bureaucrats were seeing green. Steely optimism was in the air. I was a sprightly seven months old at the time, but I like to think I cheered.
The world has, of course, recently been treated to Rio+20, a monumental meeting feted as a turning point in an otherwise sluggish diplomatic game. It was, to put it mildly, lacklustre. As multilateral chinwags go, the new Rio was on a par with last year’s Durban meeting, a critical conference that delayed a ratified climate treaty until 2020. It might be unfair to have expected too much by way of environmental targets, and, admittedly, there were slender gains on peripheral issues. Yet Rio+20 spoke of a deeper malaise, a toxic, narcoleptic weariness that threatens to derail the aspirations expressed twenty years previously. Drift any longer and we’ll be sleepwalking into a catastrophe.
The inconvenient truth is that the globalised UN process no longer provides a credible solution to climate change (let alone the other ecological woes tabled for discussion). This leaves the world at a fatal impasse, where, for once, the path is no longer clear. The solution will likely involve a makeshift patchwork of regional agreements, and urgently resorting to ersatz bilateral initiatives to establish some kind of protection for vulnerable states.
As expected, familiar tensions were aroused: the west, somewhat evasively, played fanfares for the promised ‘green economy’, whilst developing states doggedly pursued CBDR (‘common but differentiated responsibility’). Such beleaguered countries – largely lead by the so-called “BASIC” economies – make the plausible case that duty to act should be partitioned according to historical culpability. The notorious US objection to the Kyoto Protocol – the flimsy titbit of climate legislation agreed in 1997 – turned on a refusal to tolerate such moral logic, establishing an inevitable deadlock that has impaired progress ever since. It is a marginal triumph for equitability that CBDR survived Rio+20, though translating the principle into practice will be a diplomatic headache.
The ‘green economy’ mantra, conversely, has yet to prove its credentials. On the one hand, the recognition that GDP is a one-dimensional social metric is a welcome one: we need a broader, more progressive measure of development, based on ‘natural capital’. And yet, nobody is particularly sure what it means. Recalibrating the economic system for this age of enlightened environmentalism is a radical and laudable aim, but – claim detractors – the ‘green economy’ movement does no such thing; rather, it is a vacuous smokescreen for business-as-usual growth . The critics may well be right. Indeed, Caroline Spelman, the UK’s environment secretary, recently provoked ecological ire in claiming that full-blown sustainable development was not, despite appearances, oxymoronic. For ‘green economy’ advocates, the perceived trade-off between economic growth and environmental welfare is a dangerous illusion
I can’t help feeling that we should simply bite the proverbial bullet and take the bolder line: Spelman may well be right, but the green case does not rest on it’s being compatible with economic development. If we are serious about arresting the ever-deepening extinction crisis, we should – to put things bluntly – be prepared to pay for it.
In hindsight, it seems that Rio+20 was dead before it started. With electoral and economic distractions at home, many key players (including Angela Merkel and Barack Obama) simply ignored the invitation. Environmental and social welfare has slipped, fatally, off the agenda. Aware of this modern lassitude, Brazil’s draft text (which eventually became the conference’s final output) was self-consciously bland, a modest affirmation of platitudes to which nobody could object.
However much it pains me to say it, this listless conference has taught me one thing. In a desperate choice between Prom Night IV and Rio+20, I think I know which one I’d choose. These are dark days indeed.
