NEW YORK--As the world
prepares for World Summit on Sustainable
Development, scheduled to be held in Johannesburg
in September next year-10 years after the
Rio Earth Summit gave its approval to Agenda
21, the comprehensive blueprint for sustainability-the
auguries are not encouraging. Despite nine-plus
years of supposed implementation of Agenda
21, some aspects of environment/development,
including freshwater, not only show no
signs of improvement; they are markedly
worse than they were in 1992.
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According to United Nations
estimates, some 1.2 billion people around the
world-or roughly two people out of every 10-have
no access to safe and affordable drinking water.
Almost twice that number lack proper sanitation.
Pollution of water resources is increasing, as
is the threat of desertification in many areas.
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Given these statistics, one
cannot help but wonder whether the situation
would be any bleaker if the Earth Summit had
never taken place.
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Now, in Bonn, at the International
Conference on Freshwater, the world has a chance
to make amends and begin, at long last, to come
to grips with these problems. But to do that
we will have to move beyond the sort of lofty
principles and empty promises that we wasted
so much valuable time in Rio.
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But we do have some advantages.
Some of the broad strokes of global policy have
already been laid down, such as the commitment,
approved by last year's UN Millennium Assembly,
to reduce by half the proportion of people in
the world without access to safe and affordable
water by 2015. To meet that target, it is estimated,
we will have to find a way to provide water to
1.6 billion more people. And that is not something
that can be done by words alone. It will need
the expenditure of money-a lot of money.
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That, of course, brings us
to the point where the global commitment to sustainability
fell apart after Rio. The donor countries failed
to deliver on their promises of more aid to the
developing countries, which then were unable
to translate the words of Agenda 21 into actions.
They have been unable to afford the cost of maintaining-let
alone expanding and improving upon-their water
management capabilities. And there is no reason
to believe that their financial situation is
about to improve.
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According
to the organizers of the International Conference
on Freshwater,
to close the "implementation gap" in
water resource management, action is needed
in three areas:
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Governance, integrated management and new partnerships;
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Mobilizing financial resources;
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Capacity development and technology transfer.
It's a daunting
prescription. Good governance, after all, is in
desperately short
supply all over the world, in the developed as well
as the developing nations. Good management is also
scarce-and quite expensive as well. And capacity
development and technology transfer, though they
are constantly being discussed in the abstract, seem
all but impossible to make happen in the real world.
What it boils down to, when you get past the gobbledygook,
is: money, money and more money. Will the nations
of the world, or at least the rich nations, be putting
any new money on the table here in Bonn? That certainly
doesn't appear about to happen. The "draft recommendations for action," to be debated and finalized at this meeting, cite "estimates for required investment in water infrastructure . in the other of $180 billion annually," or at least $100 billion more that current expenditures.
To paraphrase the late Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, "A hundred billion here, and a hundred billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money!" But where is that money to come from? The draft recommendations offer few clues. They say:
"All sources for funding in developing countries-public funding from general budget revenues, water tariffs and charges, external assistance, and private investment-must be strengthened to bridge this tremendous gap."
Indeed they must, if any progress is going to be made toward solving this problem. But the passive verb form-"sources of funding . must be strengthened"-doesn't offer any guidance as to who must do that strengthening or how it is to be accomplished. A cynical person might even think that such vague language is just another example of "bureaucratese" being used to avoid placing responsibility on anyone in particular. If that's true, then it's very sad; we know all too well from past experience that if nobody is responsible for doing a job, then it's highly likely that the job will never get done.
As at other recent international meetings, there is strong pressure at this one to shift some of the burden of responsibility to the private sector.
The draft says:
"Private companies ranging from international enterprises to small local service providers, and including financial institutions, should contribute more actively to the sustainable governance, financing and capacity building in water."
Well, perhaps they should. On the other hand, they don't seem to have contributed nearly enough in the past, and they aren't contributing very much now. Why should we think they might behave very differently in the future? In any case, why should we think that those private companies would feel themselves bound by any agreement to which they were not a party?
Perhaps the real answer is that we must go beyond the language of "should" to the language of real commitments, with dollar figures and time-bound targets. We have to stop pretending that we can "let George do it" and face the fact that we have to do it ourselves. We have to get away from the kind of thinking that starts: "Wouldn't it be nice if . " Nine
and half years after Rio, it's about time that we began to recognize that sustainability
is not going to happen by itself; we're going to have to make it happen. Perhaps
Bonn is as good a place to start as any. |
