House of Commons - Outcomes of the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit

Outcomes of the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit - Environmental Audit Committee Contents

2 The Government's role at Rio+20

'The Future we want'

8. Over 190 countries agreed the conclusions document of the Rio+20 Summit, The Future We Want. It emphasised the importance of making progress towards sustainable development globally and set out principles and processes to help achieve that goal. The 49-page document reaffirmed previous international commitments (the Rio Principles and Agenda 21 agreed at the original Earth Summit in 1992 and the Johannesburg Plan for Implementation agreed at the 'Rio+10' Summit in Johannesburg in 2002) and set out renewed global priorities.

9. An agreement that Sustainable Development Goals (paragraph 34) should be developed was seen as one of the major achievements of last year's Summit, but there was less progress on the green economy (paragraph 28) than expected. Although it was one of the two planned main themes of the Summit, the conclusions document states only that a green economy is "an important tool" for achieving sustainable development, rather than setting firm requirements for it to be at the heart of sustainable development.[9]

10. The written evidence we received after the Summit was almost universal in its criticism of the conclusions document. WWF believed that the "Rio+20 conference … failed to deliver the systemic solutions needed to effectively address interlinked global social, environmental and economic problems".[10] Progressio thought that there were "few new or ambitious commitments and no targets or deadlines with which to hold governments to account: The agreement reached in Rio+20 is not likely to inspire the level of change required".[11] The Alliance for Future Generations was disappointed that the Summit did not agree new or innovative solutions and policies.[12]

11. The Chartered Institute of Environment Health believed that "the text imagines time that we do not have: Global issues are 'recognised', 'acknowledged' and 'noted', yet this recognition is not transformed into action".[13] On a more positive note, Stakeholder Forum concluded that although Rio+20 had not been the "coordinated leap to the future that was called for", it had "given sustainable development new hooks from which to hang future work".[14]

12. In November 2011, the originally scheduled date for the Summit was moved to avoid a clash with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee that would have made it difficult for Commonwealth leaders to attend. International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) believed the timing of the Summit was partly to blame for its failures: "Rio+20 was 'anniversary driven', and there was too much emphasis on the legacy from 1992 and not enough on articulating an agenda that responded to the key challenges of 2012".[15] A strong analytical framework to underpin deliberations was missing (the original Rio summit discussions were based on the results of the 1987 Brundtland Commission[16]) and the 'green economy' concept was "poorly explained and introduced and provoked suspicion and hostility where it could have generated enthusiasm and momentum".[17] The 2012 US presidential election campaign and the Eurozone crisis were seen as diverting attention from Rio. WWF believed that the "international political will to support [the shift to a green economy] is currently absent" and that a "major brake" on progress at the Rio+20 Summit was a view that the financial crisis should be solved first.[18]

13. IIED judged that the "level of participation from heads of government and other leading figures was very low" and that "the Summit process failed to engage a wide audience around the world and significantly spur commitment and action ...".[19] Most governments sent environment or development ministers, but their ministerial counterparts from finance, planning and business were "few and far between". Heads of large corporations, on the other hand, were "ubiquitous in Rio".[20]

14. Stakeholder Forum identified a perhaps more fundamental hurdle, in that "the balance of power both around and within the United Nations" had "changed very significantly with the great expansion of influence of China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies, and the relative decline of influence of Europe (and of the UK within it) and the USA". This new balance of power in the UN "was not in general in favour of radical action on sustainable development".[21] The poorer countries of the 'South' were:

on the whole interested above all in the traditional development agenda of poverty eradication and the help they need from the North to achieve development goals; while the emerging economies are very reluctant to contemplate any binding commitments on restraining unsustainable production and consumption while they regard themselves as having a lot of development still to do, and while for the most part the more fully developed countries have made such modest progress themselves.[22]

15. The host nation's approach to deliberations was also criticised. Greenpeace believed that the outcome document was "watered down and agreed before heads of state and government even got on their planes".[23] IIED concluded that "the Brazilian government's rather cynical eleventh hour 'take it or leave it' text for the outcome document provided a short-term diplomatic solution but not a viable long term basis for shared action and commitment".[24] Similarly, WWF believed that its role as part of the UK official delegation was a missed opportunity "in large part due to the unexpectedly early closure of the negotiating text, which meant that there was little of substance on which to engage during the [Summit itself]".[25] The Global Sustainability Institute believed that the conclusions document was "completely inaccessible to the public".[26]

16. The Deputy Prime Minister told the House shortly after returning from the Summit:

Was this summit an unqualified success on all ... fronts? No, it was not, but few would have expected it to be. But we did make progress on the key areas that the UK sees as the priority for sustainable development and green growth. ... [27]

Later he told us that the conclusions document was "not as ambitious as we had hoped it would be" but that "the Conference took steps in the right direction—most saliently on agreement to develop SDGs, promotion of corporate sustainability reporting, GDP-plus and achieving global recognition of the green economy for the first time ever".[28] He told the Liaison Committee in February 2013 that:

The traditional social and economic development agenda should be properly married to issues of sustainability. ... The Rio+20 exercise, flawed though it was in many respects, is none the less an important step in trying to bring those two things together.[29]

And he told us in April 2013 that:

Rio+20 set the direction and renewed commitments towards achieving more sustainable development. Progress is being driven forward by the whole of the Government on these.[30]

Government preparations for the Summit

17. In its response to our Preparations for the Rio+20 Summit report, the Government stated that it saw "Rio+20 as an opportunity to make critical progress" on the "global growth agenda, and to address the linked challenges of climate change, sustainable development, natural resources use and poverty reduction".[31] Defra told us that the Government had actively taken part in European meetings coordinating a common position within the EU, and had participated in the preparatory meetings and informal negotiations that took place at the United Nations. Caroline Spelman, then the Environment Secretary of State, had a personal as well as ministerial commitment to the Rio process. She told us just before the Summit that the UK was "seen as a leading country in the world in terms of preparations for the Rio+20 Summit" and perceived as a "bridging country" due to its willingness to surmount the gap between developing and developed countries' positions.[32]

18. Some of our witnesses, on the other hand, considered that the UK had put forward proposals for the Summit's initial text ('zero draft') of the conclusions document that reflected a low level of expectation for the Summit, and which the International Institute for Environment and Development judged had "no innovative ideas or ambitious proposals".[33] Tom Bigg from IIED noted that the UK contribution to the zero draft was essentially a re-presentation of the Government's earlier submission to our Green economy inquiry,[34] and therefore had a "primarily domestic focus" rather than addressing the wider Rio+20 agenda.[35] IIED believed that the Government had had "an unusually low profile" during the Summit preparations and at the event itself.[36] Christian Aid thought that the UK delegation "played a low-key role" in the UN negotiations in the run up to the Summit, particularly when compared to previous Summits where the UK had played a much more instrumental role in developing the conference agenda.[37] Derek Osborn from Stakeholder Forum told us that:

the UK limited its objectives too narrowly, too early. It could have been more ambitious in trying to tackle the whole sustainable economy agenda in the international scene, and trying to demonstrate more about how it is pushing that agenda forward ... We did not really have a powerful enough argument about what the UK and Europe are doing in practice, and across the board on sustainable development, to take it to the international agenda.[38]

19. In our report on Preparations for the Rio+20 Summit we recommended that a 'special envoy' should be appointed, to be "charged with bringing together Government thinking on the Rio+20 agenda from across departments but also acting as a focal point for discussion with and between civil society groups, schools, businesses and individuals".[39] Defra told us in January 2012 that they had been working with ministers from several departments on the Rio agenda,[40] and in February 2013 the Deputy Prime Minister told the Liaison Committee that in preparation for the Summit he had worked "very closely" with the DfID and Defra secretaries of state.[41] Such cross-cutting working was apparently not externally evident. Owen Gibbon from WWF argued that the UK "didn't have a strategy for Rio that was cross-governmental" and that "one of the reasons we were not as effective is because we did not have a cross-departmental strategy, which would involve the likes of the FCO, DECC, and DfID, but also crucially the Treasury and BIS".[42] Stakeholder Forum believed that the machinery of cross-Whitehall cooperation had not been transparent and that Defra had been "largely left on its own to handle the process". WWF highlighted a "lack of integration" in Government between its approach to Rio+20 and the G20 Summit held in Mexico a few days beforehand.[43]

20. As part of its engagement with civil society and business, Defra organised two discussions in October 2011 and invited Aviva Investors, Unilever, Oxfam and WWF to be part of the official UK delegation to the Summit. Progressio praised the Government's engagement with UK NGOs before the Summit.[44] Defra had engaged with Aviva Investors from September 2011 to discuss corporate sustainability reporting (paragraph 41), and Aviva told us that the work it had been doing as part of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Coalition "was pushed forwards by [Caroline Spelman][and] she continued to do that at Rio".[45] WWF told us that they too had had good engagement with Defra and DfiD, although the organisation's role was not defined "until quite late in the day, and even then it was quite vague".[46]

21. Defra, which took the lead in coordinating the Government's preparations for the Rio+20 Summit, consulted businesses and NGOs and brought some into the official delegation. It allowed the Government at the Summit to demonstrate a better understanding of the agenda than it would otherwise have been able to do, but the businesses and NGOs were not an integral part of the process of formulating the Government's approach to the Rio agenda. With the Rio+20 Summit now behind us, the Government should establish permanent mechanisms to continue its engagement on the sustainable development agenda and post-Rio commitments with a wider range of NGOs and businesses. That continuing engagement should also bring in civil society groups and the public, particularly to help shape the UK's contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals over the next two years (paragraph 34).

Leadership of the UK official delegation

22. The UK's official delegation to the Summit was led by the Deputy Prime Minister and included the then Defra Secretary of State, officials from five departments, Scottish and Welsh Government environment ministers, and business and NGO representatives. Over a hundred heads of state and government attended Rio+20. In our Report on the Preparations for the Rio+20 Summit we had recommended that the Prime Minister attend, but he did not.

23. Sha Zukang, the UN Secretary-General for Rio+20, said a week before the Summit that he did not think the absence of the US President, the German Chancellor and the UK Prime Minister would affect the final document because those countries would be "well represented at a high level". Caroline Spelman denied that the Prime Minister's absence would show any lack of commitment on the part of the Government and pointed to the difficult timing of the Rio meeting as one of the reasons why the Prime Minister would not attend.[47] Many of our witnesses nevertheless criticised the Prime Minister's absence.[48] Globe International argued that the relatively late decision that the Deputy Prime Minister would attend the Summit meant "it was very hard for him, given the time before Rio, to stamp a clear direction that he may have wished to take. By not having the Prime Minister go, that meant that the preparatory phase was not as clear as it could be."[49] We wanted to ask the Deputy Prime Minister about his role as head of the delegation in Rio, and it is regrettable that he declined to give formal oral evidence to us (paragraph 6).

24. On the other hand, by the time of the Summit there was little for prime ministers or heads of state to do. The Global Sustainability Institute thought that "the clear signal from the Summit was that there is no real commitment from governments",[50] and IIED believed that the Summit "had potential to be much more significant if leadership and ambition from key governments had been evident from the outset" but that lack of commitment from international leaders had then become "a self-fulfilling prophecy".[51] The Deputy Prime Minister told the Liaison Committee that he "certainly found in Rio that the Brazilian chair at the time was quite keen to push to a pre-arranged agreement—reasonably enough from their point of view—prior to delegates even arriving in Rio".[52] Globe raised the question: "if [the Prime Minister] had gone, how satisfied would he have been in going and turning up to a deal that had been put to [the leaders] three days before?"[53]

25. It is regrettable that the Prime Minister did not attend the Rio+20 Summit. There might have been a case for the Deputy Prime Minister attending in his place on the grounds that no treaty or other firm legal commitments were in prospect, and it is arguable whether the Brazilian diplomacy or the outcomes of the Summit would have been any different had the Prime Minister gone. However, the Prime Minister's absence meant that the Government failed to take advantage of the opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to the sustainable development agenda not just internationally but also at home in the UK.

9 The Future We Want, op cit, para 56 Back

10 Ev 33 Back

11 Ev w25 Back

12 Ev w3 Back

13 Ev w31 Back

14 Ev 26 Back

15 Ev 31 Back

16 Preparations for the Rio+20 Summit, op cit, para 1 Back

17 Ev 31 Back

18 Ev 33 Back

19 Ev 31 Back

20 ibid. Back