Rio Summit? More like the absolute nadir

SOME things defy parody. Leila Lopes - Miss Universe - came to last week's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to help celebrate World Desertification Day. Thus a treaty to hold back the deserts - one of the signature outcomes of the first Earth Summit 20 years ago, agreed at a time when world leaders seemed to have real ambition to save the planet - was reprised in 2012 as a celebrity photo-op.

There were no new treaties signed this time, no new pledges that countries could be held accountable to. Even a much-heralded plan to start talks on a treaty to protect the high seas fell victim to a bizarre alliance of the US and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.

I was in Rio for the first Earth Summit. Most of the world's leaders came too. They negotiated treaties on climate change, biodiversity and desertification. The story was headline news for two weeks. Reporting for this magazine, I felt part of history.

This time the final mealy-mouthed "declaration" was stitched up by civil servants the day before the modest crew of often second-tier politicians arrived. There was not even a place on the agenda for ministers to discuss the declaration, so they didn't. They spent three days reading prepared speeches and went home. By lunchtime on the final day, the place was emptying. There was nothing to stay for.

An assembly of 45,000 participants to discuss saving the world would seem like environmental profligacy at the best of times. When the outcome is so minimal, the absurdity is amplified. What on Earth did we think we were all doing here?

Nobody turned up expecting miracles, but even the most modest hopes were dashed. NGOs that are usually adept at finding crumbs of comfort at the end of long conferences seemed dumbstruck.

The natural scientists were the angriest. "What I have seen at this summit has utterly appalled me," said oceanographer Alex Rogers of the University of Oxford after the ocean treaty debacle. He headed back to the Indian Ocean to resume observation of sea mounts being trashed by trawlers.

A lot of things have been trashed in the past two decades, not least aspirations of sustainability. We are using resources twice as fast as in 1992. Carbon dioxide emissions are up 40 per cent. Some say at least we know better how to handle the mess. Green economics is maturing and may soon provide the figures to show that, as Sam Fankhauser of the London School of Economics put it here, "environmental protection is an investment, not a cost" (see "Earth Summit signals move to give nature a price tag").

Greens understandably fear market forces. But we can and must harness them to reignite the aspirations of 20 years ago, and technology does have the power to transform the way we do business. There are already signs that consumption has peaked in the industrialised world. Optimism is possible.

We should be in no doubt about the urgency, however. We are tampering with Earth's life-support systems. What is most dismaying is that the gap between what we could achieve and the political will to do so is growing dramatically larger. This is how civilisations end - like last week's conference, not with a bang but with a whimper.

Profile

Fred Pearce is New Scientist's environment consultant. He reported on the original Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992

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