Rio+20 in NYC  

Update from the UN Negotiations 
from the Global Justice Ecology Project

Note: Rio+20 is the major UN summit coming up in June in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  Rio+20 is the 20 year follow up to the first Rio Earth summit in 1992, which gave birth to the UN Climate Convention, the UN Biodiversity Convention, the Convention to Combat Desertification and of course the Convention on Sustainable Development.  All of these conventions have utterly failed to accomplish their missions.  

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But rather than wring its hands over its failures, the UN is pushing a “new approach” this time around in Rio–the so-called “Green Economy.”  Yes, Capitalism in a Green wig.  Green like the color of US dollars.  Green as in Greenwash.  Many of the organizations GJEP has partnered with at the UN  Climate Conventions and Biodiversity Conventions are mobilizing for Rio+20–but not just on the inside.  A major Peoples’ Assembly is being planned on the outside.  A follow up from the Cochabamba

April 2010 World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth

 Peoples’ Summit that followed the disastrous UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen–the Rio Peoples’ Assembly is being organized to bring people together from around the world to talk about real solutions to the global crises we face.  To get an idea of what we as so-called “civil society” are up against regarding the official negotiations in Rio, check out the post below.

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–The GJEP Team

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This Monday and Tuesday, March 26-27th, Gears of Change Youth Media correspondents Will Bennington and Keith Brunner will be reporting from the 3rd Intercessional meeting of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in New York, NY.  Member nations to the UNCSD have been meeting in “informal-informal” sessions since March 19th, in the lead-up to this June’s Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development Summit, which will be held in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.

Orin Langelle, GJEP’s board chair is on the advisory board of GEAR

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Cross-Posted from Gears of Change

26 March 2012

The first fifteen minutes of the Major Groups meeting this morning were a clue as to the state of the negotiations on the Rio+20 Zero Draft, here at the UN headquarters in midtown Manhattan.

First to speak was the representative of the Business and Industry Major Group, who reported that global business “welcomed the Zero Draft” and the fact that they’d been given greater access in the negotiations, but noted that they were still “feeling sidelined” by the process and would like to participate more actively in the process.  The private sector, she noted, sees the green economy as a linking of “economic growth with environmental sustainability,” and is pushing for an agreed-upon definition of “green economy” in the text.

Directly afterwards was the report from the Farmers Major Group representative, who affirmed that according to fisherfolk and small farmers, food sovereignty and the rights of rural women must play central roles in sustainable development strategy, with food sovereignty defined as a “comprehensive and cross-cutting framework” connecting rights, sustainability, and poverty eradication.  The delegate also pointed to the shortcomings of the Green Economy as it “diverts attention away from sustainable development.”

These reports illustrated the seemingly irreconcilable divide existing here at the negotiations, which the Brazilian negotiator (at the Major Groups meeting by invitation) characterized as “parallel worlds”- a simultaneous push by most nations and civil society to strengthen rights-based language and build off of the outcomes of the 1992 Rio summit, such as the Precautionary Principle, and the push by the most powerful nations to use the UN process to kickstart and support a major new investment frontier for global business.

The Workers and Trade Unions Major Group representative seemed to capture the mood of the room: “Our rights are being bracketed.”  Civil Society is losing, she pointed out, and needs to demand global outcomes based in democratic process at the international level.  This concern was echoed by one of the focal points for the major groups when he called on civil society to “organize” and present a unified front against the agendas of the most powerful nations and corporate interests.

We followed this divide into the first negotiating session, taking place in a cavernous room packed with delegates, all seated in beige leather chairs behind their respective member-state placard.  Hung on the walls and featured at the front of the room were large television screens displaying what could be described as the world’s most intense googledoc session- brackets within brackets, comments, additions, and clarifications.  In other words, a “cluster-doc”.

When we walked in, the process was essentially a back-and-forth between the US and the G77 (a negotiating bloc of mostly southern countries) with the US bracketing and deleting language upholding rights to food and development, and the G-77 trying to ensure social inclusion and address the shortcomings of market-based approaches to eradicate poverty.  The Zero Draft had become littered with paragraphs such as this one:

Protest Against UN Climate Strategy in Copenhagen 2009

[25 b alt: Encourage government-driven and market-oriented policies and actions to promote an integrated, action-oriented approach to sustainable development that is based on data, information, and evidence.  -US, Canada, EU, New Zealand; G77 delete]

Or, more likely, its inverse, such as a G77 proposal calling for the regulation of financial market speculation, and a wealthy nation response to refine the statement using a [positive tone].

So what will it be?  Will the “Road to Rio” further devolve into a North-South power struggle, preventing the coveted UN mandate for a green free-market investment bubble?   Or will the G77 eventually cave and sign on to this new Washington Consensus, agreeing to swap human rights language for intellectual property rights guarantees?  One way or another, the green economy ball is rolling, and its in all of our interests to follow it closely.