WSSD closes: "Snail's pace progress"

"All in all, the snail is progressing in the right direction, but the pace is entirely inappropriate to the pressures we are facing", said Grassl at the close of the UN conference held in Johannesburg, South Africa. "From the scientific perspective the agreements do not suffice to maintain the integrity of the natural life-support systems upon which human existence depends. However, as long as the international community can only take decisions unanimously, we will have to live with snail’s pace progress. There is no alternative to these negotiations among sovereign states. The general lack of political will to put national interests aside is regrettable. This applies not only to the USA, but also to the European Union, where there is internal disagreement on certain points – notably a refusal to make serious cuts to agricultural subsidies and facilitate access to European markets for developing countries", Grassl continued.

Progress in biodiversity conservation, sanitation provision and chemicals policy

"The main success of the Johannesburg Summit is the agreement reached on concrete targets and schedules for conserving biological diversity, improving sanitation provision for the poorest and mitigating the hazards posed by chemicals", Grassl went on to say. The biodiversity conservation goals were already agreed upon in the earlier Convention on Biological Diversity, but the approval of the USA is a new element. "Furthermore, the urgent call to the international community to ratify the Kyoto Protocol soon gives a positive climate protection signal", Grassl stresses. As concerns the financing of global sustainability policy, only very small steps forward have been taken. The proposal made by the Council to levy charges on the use of global commons such as international airspace or the high seas was taken up. However, this only produced an agreement to further address the issue within the UN system and to examine its implementability.

Institution-building failed

"The Summit has not produced a strengthening of the United Nations Environment Programme, not to mention establishing a World Environment Organization – on this count, it has failed. We thus continue to lack an institution able to effectively implement and monitor the goals set", Grassl said.

Energy policy disillusionment

The outcome in the area of energy policy is sobering, too. Here the USA, Australia and the OPEC states succeeded in pushing their national interests. The Summit failed to agree on a target share of renewables of at least 15 percent by the year 2010. "This makes it much more difficult to protect the world’s climate and thus to prevent weather extremes such as flood events" Grassl stresses. "On the precautionary principle, too, no progress was made in Johannesburg. All that was achieved was to prevent falling behind the 1992 agreements."

Targets and schedules of previous summits affirmed

While the 1992 Rio de Janeiro summit adopted fundamental principles and set the course of future international environmental law through the three conventions on the protection of the world’s climate, biological diversity and soils in arid zones, agreeing concrete targets and schedules was a comparatively more difficult task in Johannesburg. The Summit reaffirmed the United Nations Millennium Declaration and the agreements adopted at world conferences since 1992.

Networking advanced

"The World Summit on Sustainable Development was not least a success for building and strengthening international civil society networks. These networks are key to implementing sustainability goals" was Grassl’s final comment.