Even before the start of the Rio+20 meet in Brazilian capital Rio de Janeiro, many environment activists feared the jamboree, the biggest climate meet in UN’s history, would be a dismal failure. Unfortunately, their worst fears have been realized as the three-day UN conference on sustainable development, also known as Rio+20 summit, with participation of 193 UN member countries, ended Friday without any breakthrough. The portents were not good. US President Barack Obama (head of the biggest and largely fossil-fuel-driven economy in the world) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (head of the biggest economy in Europe, chiefly powered on coal) decided to skip the conference to focus their attention on the G-20 meet in Mexico, which brings together 20 major economies under one umbrella. Closer home, Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai was hounded by opposition parties for prioritizing a climate meet at a time all his attention should have gone into removing the current constitutional and political vacuum.
That does not mean the conference was not important. Far from it. Climate change is a topic that deserves serious attention of not just Nepali political leadership, but leaderships of each and every country in the world. Thus there was a hope that the prime minister, in his capacity as the chair of the block of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in the UN, would be able to emerge with some kind of concrete agreement on three major challenges for the LDCs Nepal had outlined for the summit: Poverty, climate change and unsustainable patterns of consumption. None of the issues got any hearing. In the session on LDCs that Bhattarai was moderating, half the seats reserved for the 48 LDCs representatives were vacant. Halfway through the three-hour session, the whole hall was nearly empty. According to those who attended the session, there was evident lack of passion and enthusiasm among the delegates as no one seemed to be listening and there was no debate on the issues raised.
Nepal’s poor preparations for the summit has in turn raised suspicions that Bhattarai—who once termed sustainable development an “anti-development agenda” and “imperialist propaganda”—was not in Rio to safeguard LDCs from adverse effects of climate change and chart the way for sustainable development; but to seek the blessings of the Indian PM Manmohan Singh for his caretaker government. The Nepali delegation’s failure to present a detailed work plan of the Kathmandu Call for Action passed by the International Conference of Mountain Countries on Climate Change held in Kathmandu in April also hinted at lack of homework.
The overall conference proved to be a disappointment too. As an AP report put it, at the end of the three-day conference world leaders agreed to “reaffirm the need to achieve sustainable development (but not mandating how); reaffirm commitment to strengthening international cooperation (just not right now); and reaffirm the need to achieve economic stability (with no new funding for the poorest nations)”. A notable aspect of the Rio summit was rich countries’ lack of commitment on addressing even life-and-death issues of poor countries. For instance, there was no substantial agreement on halting the alarming rise of sea level which threatens the very existence of low-lying countries like the Maldives and Bangladesh. By pushing the can for meaningful action further down the road, they have put the lives and livelihoods of millions of people on the line. Meanwhile, PM Bhattarai’s lofty promises on the eve of his departure for Rio have predicatively failed to materialize. He can expect some tough questions when he comes back.
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