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
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World Summit on Sustainable Development. Back
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