Earth Summit ends on a discouraging note

As a result, summit leaders abandoned efforts to adopt a key-note political statement setting a course for 8220;sustainable development8221; over the next few years.

Instead, a brief and vague preamble introduced the detailed, technical and politically less significant program of action, which was finally approved. 8220;It reflects a breakdown of that goodwill that existed in Rio, that we called the spirit of Rio8217;,8221; Martin Khor, a Malaysian activist with the Third World Network, said of the summit8217;s failures.

Some 60 national leaders, including US President Bill Clinton, were among 199 speakers to address the summit. During that five-day speechmaking marathon, diplomats in UN basement conference rooms haggled over the final documents.

They based their review on Agenda 21,8217; the 200,000-word program adopted at Rio recommending hundreds of steps governments should take to protect forests, clean up water, reverse atmospheric pollution, alleviate poverty and address other problems on the road to sustainable development8217;, the code term for economic growth for all nations, with environmental protection.

In the end, the New York conference concluded, 8220;We are deeply concerned that the overall trends8230; are worse today than they were in 1992.8221;For one thing, annual emissions of carbon dioxide, blamed for global warming, continue to rise.

Fresh water is increasingly scarce. More than 50,000 square miles 129,500 square kilometers of forest are still lost each year. And the number of absolute poor people living on less than dlrs 1 a day has edged above 1.1 billion.

The underlying problem, developing countries said, is that the rich North is not providing enough money and technology to help the poor South develop in ways least harmful to the environment.

At Rio, most industrial nations, the United States excepted, pledged to work toward doubling foreign aid to 0.7 per cent of their gross national product. Instead, development aid has actually declined since 1992.

The Dutch development minister, Jan Pronk, thought he had worked out compromise language on aid for the political statement: the North would commit to reverse the aid decline by 2000. But US negotiators did not sign on to that formula, and then the third worlders also rejected it.

On global warming, too, contending political and economic interests kept the New York summit from finding meaningful middle ground.

For two years governments have negotiated, against a late 1997 deadline, to toughen a global-warming treaty produced at Rio by making reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions mandatory rather than voluntary.