TRANSCRIPT (1,246 words, slightly
edited for clarity):
How do you feel about the progress
that has been made since the Earth Summit in Rio 10 years ago?
I think that there's been a considerable amount progress
since Rio. It depends about what level you want to talk about it.
Rio birthed the largest number of international regulations of any
single UN conference. We didn't just have the Climate Convention,
the Biodiversity Convention, but we also had the Desertification
Convention, the Straddling Fish Stocks Convention, the Persistent
Organic Pollutants, and prior informed consent. So that was a very
significant addition to the international framework for regulating
the way we behave on this planet.
We also had the nine chapters on Stakeholders, which
in Agenda 21 really define a new era for stakeholders to become
involved in the decision-making process, and actually involved in,
responsible for delivering many of the agreements that are in Agenda
21. So I think that was very important. One of the things that we
found out since then, is there are lots of gaps in the system for
joining all this together. We had no national process, so we saw
the birth of many National Councils on Sustainable Development.
In fact, we this week launched a new global Network for Regional
Government. You'd have thought places like California or Flanders
or Wales had an association. They didn't. Now they do. So we've
been filling in lots of gaps.
Obviously the world has go into a worse state since 1992.
But we're really trying to make a difference, by actually starting
to work together on collaborative action to deliver these international
agreements.
How do you feel about the WTO and the
trade agreements, and the possibility of a Convention on Corporate
Responsibility?
As an organisation, Stakeholder Forum has identified
since 1998 the need for a Framework Convention for companies in
the areas of corporate and social responsibility, something that
is missing. At the national level, we regulate corporations, we
give standards that we expect. For some reason we seem to have a
problem at the international level to do it. But we will, I think
in the next few years, see a significant move towards delivering
some type of Framework Convention. And I think Friends of the Earth
have done a very good campaign in this period up to this summit
in highlighting the need for that. So we very much support that.
In the context of the World Trade Organisation there
are many ways of answering that question. What is definitely needed
is a way by which the multi-lateral environmental agreements can
in some way have a dispute mechanism with the World Trade Organisation.
We don't want to try and just change the World Trade Organisation
because - though that's an important thing to try and do - it is
not a place where people who believe in sustainable development
are actually based: they are more based in the Commission on Sustainable
Development, UNDP, UNEP. So it's important to find a way of dealing
with any disputes between the multi-lateral environmental agreements,
also the social agreements under ILO - and the trade agreements
under WTO.
What's the biggest success of this
conference, and the biggest failure?
The biggest success of this conference is the birth of
partnerships, and I think in ten years from now, Johannesburg +
10 will be by and large a partnership conference. It will be partners
trying to deliver these agreements, trying to work out their differences
together. So I think that will be the great success.
The great failure of this conference is that we ended
up with the wrong document! In PrepCom III, the South Africans produced
a non-paper identifying the way the global agreement should be drawn
up, with a proper framework. We didn't accept that - we being in
this case being the governments - although many people did lobby.
It set us on the wrong track, and therefore we had the wrong conversations.
One of the conversations we never had here was: are the Europeans
serious about the Millennium Declaration goals? And the Americans
say that they want realistic targets. You hear in the corridors
many European governments saying that the Millennium Declaration
goals are but aspirational targets. I don't think that's good enough.
And we would have liked to have seen the discussion about incremental
targets for 2005 and 2010 for many of these areas that are 2015
targets, because very few of the politicians will be in power then:
it's very easy then to make commitments.
Given the history of what's happened
in the past, and the increasing pressure on resources and the expanding
population on the planet, and the trend towards less sovereignty
for governments and greater sovereignty for the WTO and so on, do
you think sustainability is a realistic goal that we can actually
achieve before it is too late?
I think that there are many things that we have to do
to ensure that that has a chance of success! One is to create a
new global movement of stakeholders. And I don't mean by this just
the NGOs. I mean, we have to draw in our friends in business - and
we do have some - our friends in the trade union movement, our friends
in local government, our friends in regional government. And we
have to work together to try and actually map out the way forward.
And as we do that, and as we start to deliver some of the things
that are identified in the implementation programme here and in
Agenda 21, then people will start to believe that it's possible
to go down that path. And at the moment they're not sure that it
is, because we're not giving them the right examples about how the
world might change and what - in essence - what the world would
look like if we actually were going down that sustainable path.
What do you think about the idea of
the Hydrogen economy? Is that realistically on the cards, and if
so, how soon might we see the end of the fossil fuel era?
I don't know how soon that will happen, but I think that
there are many potential scenarios based on the technology that
we can see coming down the pipe. But it's important that we don't
bank on technology to get us out of our problem. We have to address
our own standards of living, we have to address the way that we
as individuals and as groups of individuals are impacting on the
planet. A technological fix is not something that we should bank
on, and if we do that, then I think we'll make a huge mistake.
A final question. If you had a teen-age
kid...
I do - he was here!
What is it that teen-age kids need
to really understand about the future of the planet?
I think teen-age kids need to understand what role they
as individuals have, in their consumption patterns and the way that
they live their lives. And I think they're the most educated generation
about these things. This summit will have made an enormous impact
on young people around the world. And I think that they, if they
manage to look at the way that they're living, and live a little
simpler so others might simply live, as the saying says, then I
think that we'll have gone a long way to address some of the problems
of the future.
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