The series is sponsored by the Carriage House Center on Globalization and Sustainability. Its stated goal is to bring together key UN officials, nongovernmental activists, private-sector representatives and members of civil society to examine and discuss the process leading to the World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held in 2002 in Johannesburg.

The first event in the series, held at the Carriage House on October 29, was titled "From Rio to Johannesburg and Beyond," a reference to the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The four panelists discussed a number of issues including the lack of public knowledge about sustainable development, the importance of linking development with issues such as health and the environment, and the need to create a sense of urgency about the process.

"The extent to which we have actually implemented the outcomes from Rio is clearly inadequate," said UN Under Secretary General Nitin Desai, who played a key role at the Earth Summit and is now Secretary General of the Johannesburg Summit. "The problem," he continued, "is we haven't been able to generate a sense of urgency among people and thus among politicians. Part of this is because we're asking people to worry about something that hasn't happened yet."

The other panel members were Jeffrey Barber, Executive Director of the Integrative Strategies Forum; Dr. Elena Petkova, Senior Associate in the World Resources Institute's Governance Program; and Lawrence T. Papay, Sector Vice President for the Integrated Solutions Sector of the Science Applications International Corporation.

The panelists agreed that sustainable development can mean different things in different regions of the world but that its main concept is to achieve a good quality of life for people around the world without increasing the use of natural resources beyond the Earth's carrying capacity. They also stressed that integration of economic, environmental and social-decision making is a key part of achieving this goal.

Taking the example of poverty alleviation, Desai said that the problem of land degradation must be addressed at the same time as poverty since more than 70 percent of the world's poor live in rural areas of the developing world. "Even if your objectives are limited, you have to address the environment in the context of development," he said. "Development objectives must have a certain primacy in how programs are designed. It's not about coordination, it's integration."

Barber, speaking on behalf of the Citizens Network for Sustainable Development, said that the average American has not heard about sustainable development, in large part because of the lack of media coverage.

"It's not newsworthy, it's complex and, as I've been told by many journalists, it's boring," he said. "And so politicians say that there isn't enough of a 'demand' from voters to discuss the issue." The panel's moderator, veteran reporter Gabe Pressman of Channel 4, expressed his concerns about the term itself and its inaccessibility for the layperson.

"As a journalist I'm always trying to translate what people are saying," he said. "One of the major problems is that 'sustainable development' is not a very simple phrase and it's not what the average person would say."

Desai's response to Pressman was that in the 1950s "civil rights" was not a well understood phrase and that sustainable development will become accessible as more people begin to work on it and spread information about it.

Petkova focused on the need for the public to have access to relevant information about, and input into, decision-making that affects the environment and natural resources.

"Globalization increases the number of decision-makers and takes them further away from those impacted by the decisions," she said. "People are going to be more resentful if they have no say in decision making or no access to knowledge about decisions."

Governments and companies must make their processes more transparent and accessible to the public, she said. Government legislation, institutions that support public access to information, regular public information on air and water quality and on the environmental impact of industry are some of the ways to improve public knowledge, she said.

"Without knowledge of the environmental impact of development, there is no way for the environment to be integrated into development decisions," she added.

Papay, who was co-chair of the World Summit Regional Eminent Persons Roundtable for North America and Europe, spoke on industry's role in sustainable development.

"People say industry is the problem [in environmental degradation]," he said. "My thesis is that industry needs to be part of the solution." Industry still functions on a model from the Industrial Revolution, he said, when resources were considered to be free and limitless. Now, he continued, there is a need to remodel society with a cooperative effort between government and industry.

Using energy as an example, Papay discussed the need for greater efficiency and for implementing appropriate technologies in global markets with cooperation between energy suppliers and local governments.

"We have to spell out specific goals with clear targets," said Desai. "We can start with the [UN's] Millenium Declaration, which has set out clear goals and takes it into this other area. Our challenge is to show people that all the smaller, specific issues are interconnected."