Rio+20 Summit

Debate between Alan Whitehead and Martin Horwood

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

The Rio summit of 1992 represented what many people saw as a comprehensive programme of aspiration towards an international understanding of sustainability and a move towards a sustainable world economy. As the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) set out, a number of important things came out of Rio 1992, which I believe was signed up to in the end by 178 Governments. It was to a large extent informed by the unsurpassed definition of sustainability from Brundtland—that it is development

“that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

That is the famous part, but the central definition refers to other things from Brundtland, such as

“the concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and, the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organisation on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.”

If anything, it is that second element of sustainability that we have let slip by over the 20 years since Rio.

As hon. Members have mentioned, Rio led among other things to an outpouring of local enthusiasm in the form of Local Agenda 21. I was an enthusiastic Local Agenda 21-er at that time, but we were probably naive about implementation and subsequently about what sustainability actually meant.

I was recently invited to an interesting seminar on sustainable aviation. There, I wondered whether the concept of sustainability might have been pushed a little to the margins. As far as the approach to Rio+20 is concerned, it is important to get clear what we mean by sustainability and what we mean in respect of the needs and the limitations that go with the sustainability concept. We must then address those matters very seriously in the Rio+20 discussions.

Things have certainly not happened since the original Rio along the lines that those who participated and lauded what happened there would have expected. Although considerable progress has been made with the millennium goals that were set at the Rio+10 summit in Johannesburg, most of them will not be met by 2015, partly because, as I think we now know, many Governments who say they will do things simply do not do them. Being clear about that at Rio+20 will be an important part of securing a realistic outcome from what it may achieve.

Rio+20 is likely to proceed on a much more sombre basis than earlier summits of this kind, but as other Members have pointed out, last year’s Durban summit on climate change demonstrated that expectations can sometimes be confounded, and I hope that we can approach this summit in that spirit. The fact that it has been demanded by the developing world rather than by developed nations makes a significant difference. It will look to the themes of Rio, but it will do so in terms of everyone’s development. It will consider the concept of a green economy in the context of sustainable development and the institutional framework that will make it possible, and I believe that it will do so in the light of the whole Brundtland report rather than just the oft-quoted first line. It must concern itself with the carrying capacity of the planet and with its concomitant—the need for global equity in the sharing of the resources that go into sustainable development.

It might be salutary to compare that starting line with what we thought obtained at Rio 20 years ago. The work of the Stockholm resilience centre at Stockholm university was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Martin Caton), and was examined in some detail in the Select Committee’s report. The centre asked what the planet could put up with in a number of areas before its sustainability threshold was breached. What were the planet’s sustainability boundaries? It considered 10 of them: climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, global freshwater use, land system change, the rate of biodiversity loss, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution. That work made it clear that we have not only transgressed three of those boundaries—the rate of biodiversity loss, the nitrogen cycle and, of course, climate change—but have often done so in a startlingly profligate way, and are close to doing so in three other areas: ocean acidification, the phosphorus cycle, and land system change.

Rio+20, then, is not just about how the planet can carry sustainable development, but about how can we row back and make the planet sustainable again, in terms of the carrying capacity that the Stockholm resilience centre set out so carefully. We should, however, celebrate some of our international successes. For instance, as a result of an international convention, we have returned ozone depletion to a point at which carrying capacity has been restored, and have done so through international negotiation and discussion in a way that was not thought possible a few years ago. That analysis, however, tells us only some of the tale. The reason for our transgression of the boundaries that I have mentioned is, overwhelmingly, the extent to which the developed world has hoarded its access to the planet’s carrying capacity at the expense of all other countries.

This is about sustainable development, but it is also about a worldwide green economy that is based on fairness and equity. In that context, it is clear that the proposals that Colombia and Guatemala are bringing to Rio+20—there may not be time to organise their sustainable development goals properly, but I think they understand that, and see this as a starting point—do not counter the existing millennium goals. I refer to the adoption of sustainable development goals for all, not just developing nations, relating to combating poverty, changing consumption patterns, promoting sustainable human settlement patterns, biodiversity and forests, oceans, water resources, advancing food security, and energy sustainability. All those are sustainability goals for the whole world: they do not simply mean that the developed world is giving back some of what it took from the developing world in the first place.

I think that the promotion of global resources will inevitably have to be developed in order to promote those goals. I hope that the United Kingdom will support the idea of a global transaction tax—even if it does not support efforts to introduce such a tax at European level—with the proceeds going to the development of these sustainability goals.

[Martin Horwood]

I strongly support the hon. Gentleman in making that call. The Government may have been right to reject a financial transaction tax at an EU level, which would have meant a real risk of driving businesses to other financial centres. A global financial transaction tax would avoid that risk.

[Dr Whitehead]

The hon. Gentleman is right. I appreciate his continuing loyalty to his adopted coalition on the issue. I thought someone had to go it alone and advance this idea, but he is right: a global transaction tax that everyone could unite around would be a far preferable way of proceeding, particularly if that tax was clearly hypothecated for the purposes of global sustainable development and global equity.

I agree with what the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said about her approach to Rio in her recent speech to NGOs. Rio must be a workshop, not a talking shop. I also agree that being green is integral to sustainable economic growth and that we must put value on our carrying capacity so that it becomes an integral part of our economic transactions, not merely the fuel for them to take place. We must also add the essential ingredient of global equity in respect of resources. I hope the Secretary of State will pledge that the UK will push for that goal at Rio and call for the Colombian agenda of sustainability with global equity to be moved decisively forward.

That is the shape of the outcome I want at Rio. I do not want to be back here in 20 years talking about Rio+40 and wondering what might have been. By then it will be too late, as the Stockholm environment institute shows.