Rio--too many goals, and not the right ones

The best coverage from Rio is by Richard Black of the BBC. There's certainly little in US media.

Naturally the delegates have reached agreement on the declaration language prior to the convening of the principals. How could they not? But the discontent with the document is pretty universal:

--the EU "would like to have seen a more ambitious outcome"
--Friends of the Earth finds it a "damp squib of a draft negotiating text" that shows the talks "lack the firepower needed"
--the UN Secretary General must be displeased that his Sustainable Energy for All initiative is "noted" but not "endorsed"
--water as a challenge does not seem to have generated any action.

I'd say the problem is that everyone and his/her brother had to get their agenda into the document. Perhaps the outcome is not so bad after all, considering that the goals list includes:

• food, energy and water, as noted in an earlier post; 
• the green economy;
• gender equality;
• "promoting full and productive employment, decent work for all, and social protections";
• ocean conservation, including commitments to end illegal and exploitative fishing, support local small-scale fishers, and set up a process that would eventually regulate fishing and protect life on the high seas (a future post will discuss the impact of ocean issues on the Century of Scarcity);
• improvement of life in cities;
• health;
• mountains;
• forests;
• disaster risk reduction;
• small island developing states;
• chemicals and waste;
• land degradation;
• biodiversity;
• eradication of poverty;
• sustainable tourism;
• and buried within, "urgent action on unsustainable production and consumption," but without timetables or concrete actions.

Whew.

There is no discussion of the conflicts and interactions between all of these goals. To give just one example, the conference nourishes a lot of bashing of developed nations for overconsumption; yet it is the economic strength of the developed nations that has lifted so many in the developing world out of poverty.

Let's give a shout out to the Rio delegates for identifying the world's problems. Evidently it will be up to the rest of us to generate the solutions.