Select Committee on Environmental Audit Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1 - 19)

WEDNESDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2002

MR ROBERT LOWSON, MS HELEN LEGGETT AND MR ANDREW RANDALL

  Chairman

1. Thank you very much for coming this afternoon. Thank you for the very helpful information you have given to the clerk in the run up to this meeting. Is there anything briefly you would like to say before we crack on with questions?

  (Mr Lowson) Perhaps just a word of introduction. My name is Robert Lowson and I head DEFRA's Environment Protection Strategy directorate. I am accompanied this afternoon by Andrew Randall who helps coordinate our work on the sustainable development side and by Helen Leggett who is in the Sustainable Development Unit which sits within my directorate in DEFRA. I am very glad to have this opportunity to give evidence to this hearing. It was our impression that the Committee's earlier inquiry helped to raise the profile of the UK's preparations for the summit and now we are embarked on a process, which I hope we share, of ensuring that the commitments are properly followed up. DEFRA is still finalising proposals on exactly how this is going to be done and I imagine that Mrs Beckett will be able to say a lot more about this when she appears before the Committee in January. By then I hope too that we will have produced the UK's annual report on sustainable development which will also inform the Committee.

  2. We are promised that for January?
  (Mr Lowson) Yes.

  3. That is a firm promise?
  (Mr Lowson) It is a firm intention. On that basis, I am very happy to have this opportunity to talk about the outcome of the summit and the way we are going forward.

  Mr Challen

  4. If somebody stopped you in the street and asked you what change the summit would have on their lives, what would you say to them?

  (Mr Lowson) Do not expect there to be a change tomorrow afternoon because the summit was not about signing up to new commitments that would be implemented immediately. Kofi Annan described what the purpose of the summit was in his opening remarks as being not to rip up the fabric but to weave in new strands of knowledge and cooperation. We wholly abide by that. The outcome of the summit has been to intensify and develop the process of pushing forward sustainability that we were embarked on anyway, in which the UK Government was a leading figure. That said, there were a good many concrete results from the conference. We went to Johannesburg with an objective of making globalisation work for sustainable development, particularly for the poorest. We identified a number of headline areas where we wished to make progress. Overall, the Government thinks that Johannesburg did make progress, that it built successfully on last year's Doha talks on the new trade round, on the Marrakech accords on climate change and on this year's Monterrey conclusions about financial development. It therefore fits into an ongoing rhythm of multinational cooperation to promote sustainability and particularly to benefit the poorest part of the world's population. Among the concrete things which the conference agreed was a new target to halve by 2015 the proportion of the people in the world living without basic sanitation, which supports the existing millennium development goals on safe drinking water and health. There are also targets and timetables on the safe handling of chemicals, biodiversity, marine protection and fish stocks. There is to be joint action on reliable and affordable energy provision for the poor and urgently and substantially to increase the global share of renewable energy. The developed countries agreed to lead the way on developing a ten year framework of programmes to accelerate the shift towards more sustainable consumption and production. None of these will be changing on the day after the conference concludes, but they represent commitments to ongoing programmes of action. As Mrs Beckett said in describing the outcomes of the conference last month, the right way to look at Johannesburg is as the beginning of the process rather than the conclusion. In addition to these multilateral conclusions, over 300 new partnerships were launched at the summit which represented over $235 million of new resource. We have provided a table setting out the detail of that. In these partnership areas, there is concrete action underway already, for example, in some of the water initiatives that have been taken with African countries, in the development of sustainable tourism initiatives, in the promotion of sustainable financial instruments. Things are beginning to change and were beginning to change, even before the summit concluded, particularly in the area of partnerships. It was certainly our intention that we were not going to Johannesburg to sign new statements. We were going to Johannesburg to do things which would change people's lives and we are confident that, over the time to come, that is what will happen.

  5. From a British perspective, how would you rate the conference on expectations from one to ten, if you could?
  (Mr Lowson) I have never thought whether it was one out of ten or ten out of ten. The conference did not have to succeed at all; against the background of an unpromising international, economic environment and political strains around the world, it was not a given that the parties to the conference would come away from the conference having agreed anything. The fact that they did and maintained a multinational approach to dealing with the consequences of globalisation was itself a valuable step. In some ways, the conference broke new ground. The 300-plus new partnerships that I mentioned were in no sense a substitute for international, multilateral action; they were an additional means of delivering the objective of sustainable development using the Johannesburg Summit as a framework within which to adopt them. The prominence that these partnerships achieved at the conference is one of those elements that would push the score up in the direction of ten. One of the elements that would push the score down is the extent of the involvement of non-governmental parties. The negotiation at the end was clearly a negotiation between governments and the intentions which had been clearly expressed in the early months of negotiations—we are talking about a process which had run on for two years or more—to involve non-governmental players more than in conventional, multilateral negotiations faltered. It was not clear that the involvement of non-governmental parties in the event led to outcomes that were different from conventional, multilateral negotiations. That said, during Johannesburg there was a series of discussions chaired by the South Africans, facilitated by the Dutch Minister, Mr Pronk, involving a wide range of stakeholders on the five specific topics which the Secretary General had identified as crucial to the future of sustainable development. Those events seem to me to signpost an interesting and important way forward, a way of bringing non-governmental parties more actively into the negotiating process. It is perhaps disappointing that those did not happen earlier because happening at the last stage of the negotiating process meant that it was very difficult to integrate the outcome of that process into the final results.

  Chairman

  6. Overall, would you say five out of ten?

  (Mr Lowson) More than five.

  Mr Challen

  7. You said that Margaret Beckett said that this is the beginning of a process rather than the conclusion. I am wondering if the conference is work in progress or whether it had some sort of schizophrenic personality, because it started off, I understand, as Rio plus ten and I would assume it would have reviewed how far down the road after a decade the agreements of Rio have been implemented or not. That would be a sensible approach. That seems to be reflected in this document which you have given us with the gaps and the achievements of Johannesburg. This is peppered with the words "reaffirmation", "recommitment", "renewed focus", which suggest that it was looking back to some extent at what Rio perhaps had started or indeed other international conferences. Now we are being told that it is a fresh start. I wonder if we are going to continue having fresh starts when we find that things have not been done in the past.

  (Mr Lowson) You are absolutely right that part of the background to the conference was indeed to look backwards to how well the world had done in meeting the commitments that it had taken on in Rio. A large part of the documentation that the conference had in front of it was around that objective. Throughout the preparatory process and throughout the conference itself, there was a growing realisation that the world could not be satisfied with the progress that had been made. There was a need not just to take new agreements, although these were taken in some new areas such as the sanitation target that I have already mentioned. There was also a genuine need for parties to recommit themselves to some of the things which they had already pointed themselves towards at Rio.

  8. What worries me about it is that it is about recommitting and perhaps not addressing why the failures took place in the first place.
  (Mr Lowson) I would share some of that concern. It is necessary to examine why the world has fallen short in the delivery of some of the commitments that it entered into at Rio and do something about it. That is, in my view, what is happening.

  9. Where you have identified gaps, will the UK act unilaterally to fill those gaps?
  (Mr Lowson) Where it is necessary and appropriate to do that, we will look at ways of filling those gaps but in a lot of cases these are gaps which have arisen because the conference did not reach the unilateral agreements that are touched on in those areas.

  10. On the issue of partnership agreements, I read in the documentation that these totalled $225 million-worth which does not seem a great deal in global terms. What proportion could you say of that would be UK originated and are there, in global and UK terms, many more partnership agreements about to be struck which are not in that $225 million-worth?
  (Mr Lowson) It is certainly the UK's view that there is scope for more partnerships to develop, not as a substitute for multilateral action but as an addition to multilateral action. We think an important strand of the future work at the international level will be to develop means of promoting further coalitions of the willing. That is what these are. That is the difference between a multilateral agreement and a partnership. With a multilateral agreement, there is bound to be a level of compromise. With a partnership, it is the parties who are actually interested in acting in a particular area who can carry the work forward. We would certainly hope that, at the international level, machinery might develop for promoting new, additional partnerships.
  (Mr Randall) Off the top of my head, I am afraid I could not give you a precise breakdown. Obviously, we can see whether we can give you any further data on what the basis of the figure is. One of the interesting things though is that the partnerships which were officially registered for Johannesburg are not the full total of the partnerships. There were some quite prominent partnerships which were not officially registered. We know that some things the UK has done were not submitted to the secretariat, which was a slightly bureaucratic process. There will be a continuing effort to take forward those sorts of initiatives.

  11. These partnerships have to be officially registered to qualify, do they, or could that also extend to other things which perhaps were going to happen anyway and, all of a sudden, somebody has a brainwave that this could be sustainable development so we are joining the good guys?
  (Mr Randall) We were conscious in going into this that there was a danger of double counting and people simply registering things that had already happened. The organisers of the summit were as well. We set down various criteria that had to be met for things to be submitted and a closing date. As Johannesburg approached, a number of governments were trying to get things together to make them known. In some cases, they missed the deadline but partnerships were brought to the summit and announced by leaders. We have to recognise that there is a lot of useful activity which will continue, which was catalysed by the summit, but will not necessarily have been caught in what was officially registered at the summit.

  12. Could I ask that we have those figures, to know how they become officially recognised as a partnership?
  (Mr Randall) Yes.[5]

  Chairman

13. How big a disappointment was the failure on renewable energy?

  (Mr Lowson) I do not know if I would describe it as a failure on renewable energy. We had gone into the conference with an aspiration to secure targets, timetables and deadlines to the maximum extent that we could get people to sign up to in detail. There is a commitment in relation to renewable energy. It was striking that at the closing stages of the conference a large number of parties did say they wished they could have gone further. We in the UK are certainly committed to promoting further international efforts to accelerate the development of renewable energy. Some of the highest profile partnerships that we were involved in are designed to that end, such as the renewable energy and energy efficiency partnership. We are going to keep on working in this area. We are optimistic that the conference, although it did not go as far as some parties, among them ourselves, would like it to have done, nevertheless will have provided some momentum.

  14. The opposition from the oil producing countries, the Middle East countries, Russia and America is still pretty basic, is it not?
  (Mr Lowson) Yes. Some of the oil producing developing countries have taken quite a strong line on this, but we have to remember that, at the beginning of the conference, those parties were resisting any kind of commitment at all. We have undoubtedly done two things. First of all, kept the renewable energy issue on the agenda and we have raised the profile of it and secured quite a reasonable amount of international opinion which was in favour of at least looking at going further.

  15. Do you detect any movement on the part of the oil producing countries?
  (Mr Lowson) Not a lot on the part of the oil producers. It is noteworthy that, during the negotiating process, the divisions that you would expect to exist among some of the groups of countries did begin to emerge. Mexico and Brazil are members of the renewables coalition which emerged during the conference and these are important, very influential members of the group of 77. The realignment was beginning to happen during the conference, which we can expect to go further.
  (Mr Randall) To underline the significance of that, at Johannesburg it was very much a question of people negotiating in blocks. The G77 were maintaining a very disciplined front on a lot of issues, even though it is difficult for them, given the range of different countries involved, to reach agreement. They were operating in a very disciplined way so it was highly significant that we had them breaking ranks on the renewables issue and that you had Brazil quite actively lobbying for a switch in the way the G77 were approaching renewables. There are no signs yet of a softening of the OPEC position, but it is important you have Mexico and Brazil coming in. Only last week we had the EU Commission with representatives from the Danish presidency and indeed from the UK going to Brazil for a meeting about how they could take forward the renewables coalition. This is a very significant development and I think it could be very interesting to see how it develops.

  Mr Thomas

  16. Looking at the impact of the summit on UK domestic policy, you quoted Kofi Annan saying this was not ripping up the fabric but it was weaving in new threads. A critic might say it is just patching up a bad job. What would you say to that critic in terms of what policies at a UK level you would expect to change now as a result of the world summit?

  (Mr Lowson) It is perhaps not right to split UK-level policies and others. The Government will be pursuing action internationally at an EU level and domestically to deliver the results of Johannesburg. We will be working in the UN Commission for Sustainable Development which meets next spring, in the UNECE Governing Council next February, to embed WSSD[6] commitments in the way they work. A key milestone will be the Environment for Europe Conference in Kiev next May, which will be looking at actions within the UNECE area to promote environmental improvement and the scope for new partnerships within that area and new multilateral agreements within that area. Within the EU, we will be pressing for the EU to continue to give a high priority to its own sustainable development strategy, which will be considered at the European Council next spring, and we will be intent upon ensuring that the EU sustainable development strategy gets the right level of priority at this very high, political level. Domestically, what we aim to do is to embed the outcomes of the summit in existing processes and work streams. We do not want to regard WSSD as something that happens in a ghetto; we want it to become something which is mainstreamed throughout the Government process and beyond, picking up on major policy developments which we expect to occur over the coming months, such as the publication of the Energy White Paper and the action that will follow the publication of the Strategy Unit's work on waste, which are probably the most important elements when one comes to consider the delivery of the Johannesburg commitments of sustainable consumption and production.

  17. Would you say that those two very important pieces of work are now influenced by the outcomes of Johannesburg?

  (Mr Lowson) Yes, definitely.

  18. To take an example of how policy may change, there was an agreement which you included in your document to us on sustainable consumption and production patterns with an outcome of a ten year framework. No target, however, from what I can see and therefore how will that now affect UK domestic policy? I am focusing on domestic policy for the moment. The outcome has to be surely a reversal in the trend of the use of natural resources. That has huge implications, does it not, for domestic policy over the next ten years?
  (Mr Lowson) It certainly does. Because of the size of those implications, we did not come back from Johannesburg knowing exactly what we were going to do; nor did we come back to a domestic scene where things were not already happening. There are already undertakings like the sustainable technology initiative, Envirowise, the waste recycling action programme, the market transformation programme, the Carbon Trust and things like that. We need to pick up the work that is happening there, to pick up the work that emerges on waste and energy that I have talked about already, talk to stakeholders and partners about how we can build the commitments we have taken at Johannesburg into the work that is already in train in the way I have described.

  19. In ten years' time, how can we measure this at a domestic level? How can we see that these implementation plans achieve something? Surely the Government has to have some sense of target there?
  (Mr Lowson) Over the coming two years, we have a commitment to review the UK sustainable development strategy. A key element of the sustainable development strategy is the suite of headline indicators within that strategy. We will look at those indicators from the point of view of the commitments that we came back from Johannesburg with and we will ask ourselves do those indicators match up to measuring the Johannesburg outcomes. There is a clear agenda there which we will certainly be pursuing during the review process, which we aim to start quite soon.



5   See supplementary memorandum, Ev 39-42. Back

6   World Summit on Sustainable Development. Back


 
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