Earth Protect Blog

By Bruce Jones

Early Tuesday morning, 1,000 or so advanced delegates at Rio+20 earth summit (formally, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development) laid down their pens and shut off their laptops. At noon, Brazil's foreign minister, Antonio Patriota, gaveled through the Outcome Document from the chair. And by mid-afternoon, Rio was full of a sound to which that joyous city is unaccustomed: the collective moan of 40,000 environmentalists disappointed about the results. (Yes, you read that right: 40,000. Alongside 10,000 official government participants.)

But if the environment movement expected Earth-saving outcomes from Rio, they were clearly enjoying too much of Brazil's famed cachaça.

That the Rio outcome fell short of the highest expectations was not only predictable, it was predicted — by everybody. A senior European Union negotiator told me last month that the EU's major focus had already turned to lowering expectations. That was wise: No credible analysis of environmental agreements past tells us that a global summit of this kind, with a broad, encompassing agenda, can actually deliver genuine changes in the way the world does its economic or energy business. Throw in a gloomy global economic situation, and major leaps forward were a non-starter.

There were some avoidable mistakes. Brazil got into an early fight with Mexico, which was simultaneously preparing the Los Cabos Summit of the G-20, about which country would "lead" on green growth issues. (As if the problem is that we have too much leadership on green growth, rather than a dearth of it.) The result was that rather than the G-20 negotiations bolstering Rio, the two processes proceeded in parallel. For the Rio process itself, the U.N. produced a reasonable backdrop analysis but never escaped the utterly opaque language of "sustainable development," and did far less than was necessary to shape the political space for action.

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