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In 1968, the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution to call a conference on the environment in Stockholm in 1972, which was to discuss a number of problems causing deep distress in world society. Into this discussion went the growing danger of nuclear conflict, the ongoing arms race, and finally the progressive degradation of the environment conditioned on the growth of production and consumption along with rapid increase in the planet’s population. Prior to the conference, in 1971, an international seminar on development and the environment at Founex, Switzerland, marked the first way-station on the path to global sustainability. Here it was that experts first announced the existence of an overall ecological threat and of this problem’s relevance to third world countries. Most important, the seminar cleared the ground for the Stockholm Conference, which assembled from June 6 to 16 of the following year.

The conference declared publicly what had troubled scientific circles for a long time—that a severe ecological malady had developed not only in isolated regions, but on the planet as a whole. Just as in the first report to the Club of Rome, the proceedings emphasized that civilizational development could not be viewed as separate from the environment and that the two are intrinsically linked. Along with this, it was acknowledged that the course of global development as a way to satisfy humanity’s growing needs had entered into deep conflict with the environment, which the computer models in The Limits to Growth successfully demonstrated and materials from numerous then unfolding scientific observations, including satellite data, confirmed.

The Stockholm Conference affirmed a Declaration announcing 26 principles by which it recommended the world community be governed. This document gave a first complex look at the issues of peaceful coexistence, economic underdevelopment in the third world, social inequality and the ecological malady. In contrast to ideological and military confrontation, it put forward a thesis on environmental protection for the sake of present and future generations. “In the long and tortuous evolution of the human race on this planet a stage has been reached when, through the rapid acceleration of science and technology, man has acquired the power to transform his environment in countless ways and on an unprecedented scale. Both aspects of man’s environment, the natural and the man-made, are essential to his well-being and to the enjoyment of basic human rights the right to life itself.” (Declaration… 1972)

And while the documents and decisions from the Stockholm forum did not have an obligatory character and did not presuppose a procedure for ratification by the various governments, it carried such great resonance that it laid the cornerstone for a wide network of national environmental protection structures and created a powerful impulse for developing environmental legislation in most of the world’s countries. Those years were also marked by the establishment of the “green” social movement, which established itself in many governments, one after another. Regarding the direct results of the Conference, it is worth naming the special UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) with its headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya.

In this way, starting from 1972, environmental protection activities have taken on a wide scale, with their primary focus becoming the fight against pollution. Direct expenditures alone on these goals added up to $1.5 trillion over the following 20 years (Danilov-Danil’yan and Losev 2000). Developed countries have invested enormous sums in the modification of so-called “dirty” technologies as well as atomic energy, imagined at the time to be environmentally clean and adequately safe.

However, the disparate, uncoordinated efforts for environmental protection could not dramatically alter the dangerous course of runaway global development. The need for a single program of action for the whole global community was felt ever more acutely. Just such a program would be created, and the formation of the Brundtland Commission, named for its chairwoman, Norwegian politician Gro Harlem Brundtland , served as the first step toward that goal. The commission first gathered in 1983, under the aegis of the UN World Commission on Environment and Development.

The Commission’s tasks included preparing proposals for long term strategies in the area of environmental protection , as well as formulating goals that would serve as guideposts as various world governments developed their own frameworks for practical action. In 1987, the Brundtland Commission published a program report under the name Our Common Future . A large number of international experts took part in the work, and it was translated into all of the world’s most common languages.

Without using the word “crisis,” the authors had materially characterized the biosphere as being in a state of crisis, and the planet’s demographic situation was described in a similar vein. But, while acknowledging the necessity of specific regulation in the area of natural resource extraction, they put this in relative rather than absolute terms. The measures would depend on the level of technological development and existing social relations. Only under condition of ongoing improvement and control would the opportunity to begin a new era of economic growth open before humanity.

Beyond the dubious nature of this postulate (which we will discuss later), the report did not adequately assess the process of ecosystem disappearance. And the biota was materially equated to an economic resource, albeit one which possesses an ethical, aesthetic and cultural value aside from the monetary.

But if the Brundtland Commission did not proceed to announce the full-blown ecological crisis, another book by leading ecologists and economists did so at the top of its voice: Environmentally Sustainable Economic Development: Building on Brundtland, edited by R. Goodland, H. Daly, S. El Serafy and B. von Droste, published by UNESCO, 1991. In it, the contributors said that the global ecosystem served as a sink for the pollution created by the economic subsystem. However, under the weight of the latter’s extreme growth and expanding size, this pollution has become too great relative to the biosphere. As a result, the absorbency of biospheric sources and sinks has come under unrelenting stress. And while, in the recent past, a person could go about their business without a thought to the adaptive capabilities of the biosphere, and the world seemed a bottomless reservoir, able to swallow up any amount of economic byproducts, now the era of the “empty world” has come to an end, and the “full world” epoch has begun (Environmentally…1991).

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Both the Brundtland Commission Report and Building on Brundtland were lying on the table among the working materials at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) , held from June 3 to 14, 1992. It was a truly global conference, unlike anything history had seen. Representatives from 174 countries took part in the Rio Summit, including 114 heads of government or state, 1600 nongovernmental organizations and a countless number of journalists. At the same time in Rio, the “Global Forum” on environmental problems was going on, drawing about 9000 different organizations and 29,000 individual participants as well as 450,000 guests and observers arriving on their own initiative. Thus, this event fully earned the right to be called the Earth Summit (United Nations Conference… 1992).

One unquestionable achievement of the Conference was its accompanying intellectual process, broad discussion and exchange of ideas, over the course of which the whole body acknowledged the strategically significant postulate that problems of the environment and development could not further be viewed separately. The UNCED convincingly demonstrated the organic interrelation between the state of the environment, poverty and underdevelopment among a significant portion of third-world countries, and the vicious system of production and consumption in most developed states. The pressure of population growth on nature, energy use and climate change, the tropical lumber trade and desertification—all these aspects of global and regional ecology were discussed at such a level and attracted attention of such scales as would hardly have been dreamt of at the time of Stockholm.

But, we dare say, the most meaningful result of the Conference was the widespread introduction of the term Sustainable Development , which was conceived as an alternative to the previous, nature-destroying course of civilization. Here is how the Brundtland Commission formulates and interprets the concept: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Our Common Future 1987: p. 41).

The UNCED’s proposed concept of sustainable development was based on the Brundtland Commission report and included the following main proposals:

  • The main priority of sustainable development should be people, who have a right to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature;

  • Environmental protection should become an inexorable component of the development process and cannot be viewed separately from it;

  • The task of preserving the environment involves not only the present generation, but future ones as well;

  • Reducing the gap in standard of living between countries and eliminating poverty and want are among the most important tasks of the global community;

  • In order to transition onto the path of sustainable development, governments should re-examine models of production and consumption that do not facilitate it

(Rio Declaration… 1992).

Over the course of the Conference, the assembly adopted several documents, the most important of which were the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development and Agenda 21 (A plan of action for achieving ecologically sustainable development going into the twenty-first century).

The Declaration reflected the evolution of thought concerning environmental problems over the 20 years since the Stockholm Forum. These ideas, or principles, were recommended as guidelines to develop plans for a transition to sustainable development, addressed to the whole global community as well as the various states.

So, for example, Principle 1 postulates the leading role of the population in realizing sustainable development . The state serves as guarantor for environmental quality and carries responsibility to other countries for any harm done (Principle 2). Principles 3–5 particularly emphasize the inseparability of socio-economic development goals from the interests of environmental preservation for both present and future generations. Principle 10 asserts the major significance of the public’s role in resolving environmental problems, while Principle 11 does the same concerning the development of environmental legislation.

A special article, Principle 15, focuses on ecological caution: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” Furthermore, governments are advised to use economic mechanisms as a means of protecting nature, including payments for pollution (Principle 16), as well as an ecological expertise mechanism to assess harmful environmental consequences of planned activities (Principle 17), notifying other states of natural disasters and technological accidents fraught with cross-border consequences (Principle 18) and so on (Rio Declaration …, 1992).

The other most important document of the Summit was Agenda 21 . While in the Stockholm Plan of Action, the great majority of recommendations related to five problems (environmental assessment and management, detecting global pollution, environmental education, information and culture, development and the environment), with Agenda 21 , the accent was put on social and economic development, justice and international cooperation. The “Agenda” includes over 100 programs covering a wide range of problems, from overcoming poverty to strengthening the role of the public in resolving ecological challenges.

A few important aspects, however, such as the structure of consumption, debt in developing countries or the export of dangerous waste, were either poorly represented or absent entirely from the authors’ purview. Nonetheless, Agenda 21 served as a kind of touchstone for national programs of transition to sustainable development, which UNCED encouraged all the world’s governments to develop. At present, no fewer than a hundred countries have them. (In Russia, such a program has still not been adopted, though a project for one was developed way back in 1997.)

We cannot avoid speaking, however, of the other side of the coin, the sense of disappointment with the results of the Rio Summit, which was unable to rise to the level of the challenges standing before it. Of particular notice among the general choir of criticism rang out the voices of such authoritative specialists as Ernst von Weizsacker, Herman Daly, Donella and Dennis Meadows and many others.

More than anything else, it was several of the outcome documents from that landmark forum that left them deeply dissatisfied. Despite documenting global changes to the environment—the elimination of forests, the reduction of the biosphere, the dangerous climate shifts—none of them acknowledged the fact that the planet had truly entered a phase of full-scale ecological crisis, and that this crisis demanded a radical re-thinking of the existing principles of global development. And, most importantly, no attempt was made to initiate development of a scientifically-based strategy for such development and lay for it a solid theoretical foundation. Just the opposite, more likely, in their understanding of the problems at hand, the majority of conference participants came from a position of pure criticism, centered on the store of past experience. And this experience, it seemed, had demonstrated more than once the broad human capacity to untangle the tightest imaginable knots with help from the achievements of scientific progress or improvements to social and economic institutionsFootnote 1. By counting on such, as it would seem, tried-and-true instruments, the conference participants were also clearly trying to apply that proven previous experience to the present day. They guessed upon an answer to a question fundamentally new to civilization with the help of structural and technological reconstruction of industry, introduction of low-waste technologies and other well-worn approaches from past decades (Danilov-Danil’yan and Losev 2000).

And, meanwhile, in the second half of the twentieth century, humanity made a discovery of such magnitude that, against its backdrop, thinking in the same categories has become impossible: Humanity has “discovered” the environment for itself. After centuries of ignoring it as something external, having only an indirect relationship to himself, man suddenly found that the environment is connected to every aspect of his being without exception and in the most intimate ways, from the global economy to the state of his health. And that the functioning of the environment obeys its own intrinsic laws which people have lagged behind a hundred years in studying, entering, as a result, into an intractable conflict with nature. It was this inherently new reality, clearly, that a majority of conference participants failed to take into account, mechanically superimposing all that had been worked out in the preceding century and a half onto today’s fundamentally different situation.

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In accordance with decisions in Rio de Janeiro, the following World Summit on Sustainable Development was to take place in 10 years. After about 3 years of planning, it opened in August, 2002, in Johannesburg, South Africa, and nearly matched the Rio Summit in representativeness and number of participants. But while UNCED-1 stirred hope among the global public, the same, unfortunately, could not be said of “Rio+10,” in large part due to the extremely limited progress made in the area of sustainable development over the previous decade. This skepticism proved justified, and grounds for disappointment were more than adequate. As the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development said on this account: “The global environment continues to suffer. Loss of biodiversity continues, fish stocks continue to be depleted, desertification claims more and more fertile land, the adverse effects of climate change are already evident, natural disasters are more frequent and more devastating, and developing countries more vulnerable, and air, water and marine pollution continue to rob millions of a decent life” (Johannesburg Declaration… 2002).

Two main documents were adopted at the Summit—the previously mentioned Declaration and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, a high-level action plan concerning sustainable development.

In both documents, a leading position was devoted to poverty as the main factor of social instability, crime and moral decay. Poverty gives rise to a sense of hopelessness and apathy, and with it, total irresponsibility in relation to nature, society, and, finally, to one’s own children who, finding themselves at the social bottom, receive a perverse conception of the surrounding world, in turn becoming antisocial personalities. At the same time, poverty is inseparably connected to weakness in the economy and the issue of work. Unemployment, after all, is one of the main factors in social degradation. But as most job openings in modern production, and even more so in management, require education and qualifications, access to them is an irreplaceable precondition to eliminating poverty. In Johannesburg, therefore, it was proposed that states develop national programs to provide wider access for poor citizens to productive resources, credit and education, as well as equality for all members of society in receiving education or work (Marfenin 2006: pp. 583–84).

The plan contained a number of other important recommendations from the social and environmental spheres: providing the poorer classes with access to agricultural resources, including free introduction to sustainable farming methods; transfer of affordable energy technology to developing countries (biomass, wind generators, small hydroelectric stations, etc.); development of rational economic methods to prevent degradation of land and water resources; and so on (UN Johannesburg Plan… 2002). The Summit also recognized the need for dramatic changes in the established system of production and consumption and called on countries to encourage models that would not bring harm to the environment or undermine the natural resource base. For the first time at this level, the problem of globalization was looked at with all of its positive and negative consequences for various countries and world regions.

But while Rio and preparatory work leading up to it made first, uncertain steps toward the creation of a scientifically-based concept of sustainable development, the Johannesburg Summit preferred to avoid looking at questions of that sort. Concentrating on isolated, albeit extremely relevant problems of modernity ; such as the fresh water deficit, food supplies, energy and preserving biodiversity, it was as if it had demonstrated with its whole attitude that resolution of humanity’s pressing issues required not so much plans and programs as incessant undertaking of concrete practical steps. World Summit General Secretary Nitin Desai acknowledged in his speech that the participants did not foresee any great breakthroughs or the signing of any treaties (Johannesburg High Level…2002).

Indeed, many of the agreed upon target indicators had been confirmed at lower level functions—during development of the Millennium Development Goals, adopted in accordance with the UN General Assembly decision of September 8, 2000, and in the execution of its Millennium Declaration (UN Millennium Declaration… 2009). The main attention of the Summit was focused on working out diverse concrete plans, goals and graphs. Desai, in his closing words, recognized that many attendees would have wanted more meaningful results, but that achieving them would require additional resources (Johannesburg High Level… 2002).

But people were waiting for a breakthrough from the Johannesburg forum, or at least a serious strategic layout for the future development path insofar as its very Declaration acknowledged that the world was not approaching sustainability, but rather was moving further from it. Were the issues placed on the agenda important? Yes, unquestionably important; on their successful resolution depends the well-being of tens of millions of people. But trying to solve each separately, without regard for their systemic interaction, is obviously a futile business. After all, a conference at such a level doesn’t assemble every year. It’s an event of global significance. You could say without exaggeration that the world awaited some fateful decision, where the most relevant question standing before humanity is “to be or not to be?” and the majority of global environmental indicators demonstrate a sustained trend of decline. But, unfortunately, the summit could not rise to the level of its own mission.

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If the conference at Rio de Janeiro (1992) and the Summit at Johannesburg (2002) met with no few public expectations, then the Rio+20 Summit , assembled in the Brazilian city for the twentieth anniversary of the Conference on Environment and Development, remained under a shadow and certainly did not become an event. This, despite the fact that its declaration “The Future We Want” and other outcome documents contained a particular novelty.

In part, this included the idea of a “win-win,” simultaneously addressing socio-economic and environmental problems. As the experience of past decades had shown, attempts to resolve them separately fail to engender an interested response from civil society and, consequently, do not lead to success. Therefore, programs directed at raising employment or improving people’s quality of life were recommended to immediately include corresponding environmental priorities. In other words, socio-economic projects should involve the resolution of ecological problems, and environmental projects—provide a positive socio-economic effect . In this way, people’s interest in the resolution of issues troubling them would draw them to address environmental problems as well.

Among the concrete proposals and plans adopted by Rio+20 , we will note the UN General Secretary’s stated aim of developing the concept of energy security, raising efficiency in forest management and the creation of new development goals meant to replace the old Millennium Development goals in 2015. Beyond this, a number of important agreements were made in back rooms of the forum relating to the financing of sustainable development projects in the areas of agriculture, energy, transport and forest restoration.

And nonetheless many participants of the forum expressed their dissatisfaction with its results. It had done much less than it could have, and the basically correct declarations turned out untethered to concrete practical steps and corresponding legal obligations, not to speak of the fact that no agreement was reached to adopt obligations for ocean resource protection or any progress made on the issue of removing fossil fuel subsidies (Pisano et al. 2012).

As a result, the social organizations represented at Rio de Janeiro, having come forward with the petition under the name “The Future We Want,” disassociated themselves unanimously from the outcome documents of Rio+20. They cast particular attention on the lack of progress in water resource management which, in the opinion of WWF director Lasse Gustavsson, should be based on natural rather than political limitations. “What we need is…a duty to protect and restore natural drinking water supply systems, forests, which protect water resources, and to prepare the world for the hits it will take from climate change” (RIA.ru 2012). Kevin Henry, project coordinator for “Where the Rain Falls,” published an article called “Rio Plus 20 or Rio Minus 20,” judging the 2012 conference as a giant missed opportunity, or even a large step backward (Care International 2012).

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Despite all of the grievances lodged at UNCED 1992 and the following global forums on the environment and development, each of them has become a milestone on humanity’s historical journey. In the direction of increasing global sustainability, we might like to add. But, unfortunately, objective data testifies to something else. The world is still moving in the direction of unsustainability. That is what sets the stakes so high. Indecision and half measures on environmental protection, after all, do not amount to running in place, but rather to an inevitable slide toward global catastrophe.

As Kevin Henry said in his above-mentioned article, “Rio Plus 20 or Rio Minus 20,” “The clock really is ticking, not least because of the threat posed by climate change, but our political leaders—almost universally—do not seem to hear it. Or worse yet, the political elite hear it and choose to ignore it, thinking that making major changes in our approach to development can wait until they have attended to other ‘more important’ or ‘more pressing crises.” (Care International 2012). Recalling that since 1992, when the first Rio Summit was held, global CO2 emissions have grown 40% and biodiversity has fallen by 10%, he considered it necessary to add that at current pollution levels global warming, as scientific data testifies, “will continue unabated and almost certainly exceed the 2 degrees centigrade deemed ‘safe’.”

Thus, it is from these positions that we must approach assessment of all four international forums. In truth, it will be nature itself that judges them most harshly, having, despite many unquestionable local successes in its protection, demonstrated a sustained tendency toward degradation across a whole range of global parameters. Against this backdrop, the only major achievement the world community can truly be proud of is the ozone story, which we discussed in the previous chapter. Even there, it is still premature to speak of ultimate stabilization of the ozone layer, despite a full cessation in production of ozone-destroying substances.

Granted, we cannot underestimate the significance of this victory: After all, beyond the direct, physical result, humanity received convincing confirmation that global ecological projects could be realized. However, this lone success has not yet been followed up by any other such tangible headway, and there is no question that the world is becoming ever more ecologically unsustainable.

Unfortunately, this last fact also correlates to a noticeable decline in public enthusiasm for the idea of sustainable development, whose peak arrived in the 1990s. Furthermore, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York, after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, after the financial crisis of 2008–2009, after the series of social earthquakes in the Arab World and the wave of immigrants pouring into Europe, one also notices a decline in the number of scientific publications focused on the state of the environment. That’s understandable: The world community simply doesn’t have the strength or the money to deal with everything. Thus we are forced to make an unconscious choice between the pressing issues of today and those that may come to fruition the day after tomorrow should we put off the resolution of long-term problems for later.

This is a false dichotomy, however, like choosing between the health and wealth of one’s children and grandchildren. Sustainable development represents not only a life of peace and harmony with nature. It also entails the population health of humanity, its social and interethnic stability, and the rebirth of many age-old values common to the human race, lost or deformed through the costs and distortions of modern civilization. Thus, in putting off the resolution of long-term problems, we may arrive at “tomorrow” with empty hands, when it is too late to solve them.