Politics –not a popularity contest

From Kenya to South Africa, African law-enforcement and conservation authorities are facing a continuing battle with poachers.
And it is in strife-torn African countries where governance is at its weakest, that the elephant population is being hit hardest, with thousands of jumbos killed each year.

Conservationists have recorded steep declines in population and fear fewer than 20 000 of the Great Lakes region’s forest elephants remain in the Congo basin.

Although Zimbabwe has a zero tolerance policy for wildlife crime, strong institutions and laws must be developed to ensure the policy is enforced given rampant poaching and proliferation of ivory and rhino horn on the streets of Harare. Illegal wildlife trade is the fifth largest illicit trade worldwide, and it finances insecurity across Africa.

Africa has about 500 000 elephants (the bulk of them in Zimbabwe and Botswana), but the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) says they are increasingly threatened. Despite a 23-year ban on international trade in ivory, elephants continue to be shot for their prized tusks, with much of the material ending up on sale in China.

Under the circumstances, the very future of the African elephant, the largest land mammal on Earth, could be at risk. We don’t want our children to inherit an empty forest, do we?

Sadly, as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) annual Standing Committee meeting took place in Geneva from July 23-27, a report graded 23 African and Asian origin, transit and destination countries implicated in illegal trade of ivory, rhino horn and tiger parts giving them scores of green, yellow or red for each species group.

It concluded that poaching for international trade is threatening elephants, rhinos and tigers.

.Over 250 rhinos have been killed so far this year in South Africa.

.Tens of thousands elephants are killed each year for their ivory

.There are as few as 3 200 tigers left in the wild

Laws exist to protect elephants, rhinos and tigers, but governments are not doing all they could to save them.
Criminal kingpins involved in illegal wildlife trade are according to conservation groups distributing guns, intimidating communities, exploiting the poor, and bribing officials in order to get what they want.
In 1989, Kenya under Daniel arap Moi became the first African country to burn its own stockpile of seized ivory, while Zambia torched tusks three years later. Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki under the auspices of the Lusaka Task Force Agreement (LATF) last year again burnt ivory mountains.

Inspired, Gabon also burnt its ivory stockpiles worth $9,3 million sometime last month. Gabonese President Ali Bongo, who lit the pyre, said: “We believe this is a strong signal of intent . . . against poaching and illegal wildlife trade — at a time of intense poaching pressure in central Africa, where the illegal killing of elephants for ivory is at record levels.”

Should countries burn their ivory stockpiles to halt illegal trade? Were these actions popularity stunts? Can we imagine what that money could have done to change the lives of those living alongside the jumbos? Is there a way to humanely remove the tusks of elephants to make them less of a target to poachers who only kill them for the tusks?

Not at all, an elephant’s tusks are like teeth and they need them to dig, feed, and settle their differences.
The Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority is currently sitting on 52 000kg of raw ivory, worth tens of millions of dollars. Zimbabwe was allowed a once-off ivory trade in 2008, but the moratorium ends in 2018.

The upsurge in poaching in Zimbabwe and other countries is cause for concern — what with some political upstarts invading conservancies. It appears to me that most countries’ policing is lax, and the laws too lenient for abusers of wildlife heritage. The influx of foreign tourists to view game in Africa should serve as a lesson.
Where will our children go for game viewing in future?

The current demand for endangered species products in Asia, especially China, is unprecedented and largely driven by demand for medicinal products, such as rhino horn and tiger parts, or as a demonstration of economic and social status, through products like ivory and rhino horn carvings or tiger bone wine.

This horrific addiction to ivory and the rhino horn can be stopped. But, as long as humanity still sees either of these two wondrous animals as a form of monetary value, the senseless killing will continue unabated.

Every night many of us must carry with them the sickening heartache that across Africa 100 elephants have breathed their last –yes, every day 100 elephants, 36 000 jumbos every year. Do we have any idea of how to picture this in our minds?

Why the Chinese — presumably the second biggest economy in the world due to their industrial revolution, a country with the biggest (20% of the world) population at 1,3 billion, with the biggest investment in the US at $1,6 trillion, who have joined the space-race, have over 50 game parks for their almost extinct pandas, who once had elephant and rhino roaming their lands (killed them off), who appear to be intelligent people, but still believe that rhino horn in traditional Chinese medicine will cure a multitude of ills including breast and cervical cancer.

If this was the case, then wouldn’t modern medical science have started “rhino farming” long ago if the rhino horn really cured all these medical ills?

The African rhino and elephant do not belong to the adults of this world (us) — they are the future gifts to the children of our world.

Should/shouldn’t Kenya, Gabon and Zambia be congratulated for making the point that ivory must be worthless, except as what it was meant to be in the first place: as part of an elephant?

email: millenniumzimbabwe@gmail.com/http://twitter.com/wisdomdzungairi

Snowfall: Signs of the time

It is not just hot air. No! Climate change could also mean more snow.

Unexpected snowfall in Eastern South Africa and freezing temperatures in Zimbabwe respectively during the last week, have been described by climate experts as a feature of global warming.

The heavy snow in South Africa triggered the closure of two of its main highways linking the capital Pretoria and nearby Johannesburg in the country’s north to Cape Town in the south, the local Road Traffic Management said.

The snow last Tuesday also disrupted air and rail transportation. The snow also forced closure of shops and schools.

According to officials, there are no alternative bypass routes. The prospects are made worse by forecasters warning that the snowfall was likely to continue until Sunday (yesterday).

Weather forecasters said: “Latest models indicate that a second cold front will move in over South Africa today (Saturday). Very cold conditions are expected over the north-western high ground of the Western Cape and southern high ground of the Northern Cape.

“Very rough seas with wave heights from 4m to 6m is expected to develop between Cape Columbine and Plettenberg Bay and gale force westerly to north-westerly wind (65km/h) is expected between Cape Point and Cape Agulhas in the afternoon.

There is also a possibility of snow on the high mountains of the Northern and Western Cape.”

Parts of South Africa usually receive a dusting about once or twice a year, but the storm that hit large parts of the eastern half of the country last week dumped up to 60 cm in some areas. “Snow is not unheard of, but it is usually not this extreme,” national weather service forecaster Karl Loots was quoted as telling Reuters.

South Africa experienced its coldest night on record two nights last week, and even in Zimbabwe it was extremely cold triggering bouts of flu. I had not been downed by flu in a very long time, but this time around it is something else and I am still recovering.

The adverse weather has shocked and surprised many locals, with forecasters warning that worse conditions could follow. Perhaps global warming sceptics would point to the heavy amount of snowfall South Africa has experienced this year. However, they could be wrong, according to a sampling of scientific opinion.

Experts caution that there may be more winters like this, where snowfall has so far nearly doubled the norm. But that would be only until it gets too hot to snow, they added.

A professor of geophysics in the US Raymond Pierrehumbert said: “ln the simulations I’ve analysed, you can get some quite big blizzards up until the year 2040. But between 2040 and 2080, it starts to get too warm to have much snow at all and it gradually sort of peters out.”

Climatologists say snowfall is more difficult to predict than rain because it depends on a broader range of factors, such as atmospheric temperature and the la Nina phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean. What they do agree on, however, is that warmer atmospheres can hold more precipitation.

Of course, one winter season can’t be taken as an indication of future climate patterns. This year’s average winter temperatures will probably end up below normal.

But this season’s precipitation levels, combined with atypical temperature fluctuations around the country, reflect what climate experts say will be some of the side effects of global warming.

A recent study suggests global warming will result in more extreme rain and snowfall as warmer temperatures speed up evaporation and allow clouds to hold more precipitation.

Snowfall is part of a continuing pattern of cold snaps across Africa that has also seen unprecedented ice storms in Kenya, resulting in four inch deep hail covering the ground.

The cold snap, which has triggered health problems within the populace in the country, arrives on the back of the sun reaching a milestone not observed in nearly 100 years.
Zimbabwe’s temperatures soaring into a heat wave last year topped over 40 degrees Celsius in areas like Kariba, Harare, Bulawayo, Gokwe, Chiredzi and elsewhere.

China experienced its coldest winter in 100 years while northeast America was hit by record snow levels — Sydney experienced its coldest August for 60 years and Britain suffered its coldest April in decades, all this happening from 2008.

Rapid decrease in solar activity is an event that has always preceded so called mini-ice age periods throughout history, no wonder then that many scientists are predicting prolonged global cooling.

Not those in Zimbabwe or South Africa, however.
In a South African Independent article titled: “Warming has a hand in recent wild weather”, Joanne Yawitch, the deputy director general of the department of environmental affairs noted that “climate change”, as in man-made climate change, was playing a role in the adverse weather patterns.

“What it raises for South Africa is the ability to develop a [resilience] to weather changes and how to deal with these,” she said then.

Her utterances echoed those of World Wildlife Fund development and sustainability programme manager Paul Toni, who told reporters in Australia that: “The freezing temperatures are proof of the urgent need to cut carbon pollution.”

Indeed — in case you weren’t aware of the new climate change catch-all explanation, man-made CO2 emissions could cause global cooling as well as global warming.

Hence, all weather events, be it snow, rainfall, storms, hurricanes, typhoons or earthquakes could also be caused by CO2 emissions. This is because none of the current weather trends fit in with the notion that has been pushed for the better part of a decade now that an overall heating of the Earth mandates the poor and middle classes be hit with multiple forms of lifestyle restriction and CO2 taxation, in order to save the planet.

email: millenniumzimbabwe@gmail.com/http://twitter.com/wisdomdzungairi

West led Africa down the garden path

In my last installment I indicated that anti-littering should become part of our culture to save the environment.

But this can only happen if we can move our attention away slightly from the poisoned politics that seem to dominate our environment.

The reason is that the level of environmental damage in Zimbabwe is worrying. During the week, I dealt with this issue outgoing United States ambassador to Zimbabwe Charles A Ray urged Zimbabweans regardless of their strata in society to consider other important matters than get consumed in endless political debates.

Sadly, some among us in their wisdom or lack of, think that one can never be neutral — to them if you are not Zanu PF, you belong to the MDCs or vice versa. That notion is not only cynical, it is outright stupid. What matters most should be our being Zimbabweans, finish!

Yes, it is possible to be neutral in a resentful society like ours. I will not digress any further.
After taking a break on climate change, I was persuaded to deal with the recent United Nations Summit on Sustainable development (Rio+20 Earth Summit) subject once again this week. Of course, it really is still an important subject. At least it’s about our sustainability, our environment — “The Future We Want”.

By their nature, UN summits are high-profile gatherings as countries are represented at the highest level. Zimbabwe’s delegation comprised President Robert Mugabe and Environment minister Francis Nhema, among a coterie of bureaucrats.

The high-profile meeting ended on June 22, but Zimbabweans are yet to know what the country position paper contained. Curious isn’t it? The Environment ministry is yet to convene a stakeholders’ report back meeting almost a month later. What is happening here? Whose duty is it to give feedback to the people? Don’t the public need to know given the importance of the subject? I do not think people owe it to bureaucrats, (but) it is them who owe it to the citizens.

Almost all delegations to the Earth summit have reported back and admit that African leaders lost the battle at the negotiating table. It is now clear from other delegations that Africa was led down the garden path. Of course, you get what you negotiate for.

UN Economic Commission for Africa (Uneca) on June 25 frankly said that the final outcome document, “The Future We Want”, only looked ahead towards creating “green growth” while doing nothing to hold accountable those who were primarily responsible for causing global warming.

In remarkably blunt language, Uneca made clear the deep frustrations felt by African leaders who, as usually happens in these multilateral forums, were forced to accept a bad deal rather than walk away with no deal. Although they were well aware of the “ambush” that awaited in the end, they did fall victim to it.

Basically, this means that not only will the main polluters, the industrialised countries, be doing little or nothing to pay for the damage they caused, but they will now be presenting their new environmental technologies as “part of the solution”.

These technologies will now be sold to developing countries either directly or through aid packages or soft loans with hidden terms and conditions.

The African spokesperson and political co-ordinator of the Rio+20 process, Congo President Denis Sasso N’Guesso a day before the summit ended, downplayed Africa’s limited success at the Earth Summit, saying: “We should now focus on the areas of the Rio+20 outcome document that we think needs further negotiations in the coming days and months.”

We are told African delegations saw as a deliberate tendency by developed countries to rescind all earlier commitments on poverty reduction and the economic development of the continent.

It must be recalled that the Africa Consensus statement for Rio+20 observed that not much had been achieved in any of the key areas of the statement — renewed political commitment; green economy in the context of sustainable development; means of implementation institutional framework for sustainable development and sustainable development goals.
In fact, except for means of implementation in the context of green economy, little else had been achieved.

Much to the dismay of many African delegates, the language and overall tone during general discussion at the conference was “aspirational” and non-prescriptive, as had been the case in most previous development conferences.

Indeed, throughout the final phase ofnegotiations leading up to the Rio+20 outcome document, there had been an obvious move away from straight language on rights and equity principles, led by the richest countries and reflected in attempts to leave as unagreed, 20-year-old Earth Summit principles.

The African proposal on the transformation of Unep into a UN specialised agency on environmental issues was referred to the General Assembly of the UN, which comes up next September and we must begin work on it right away, if we want to see the process go through.
The current world economic situation had made it more unlikely for development partners to deliver on their commitments towards Africa’s development.

The truth of the matter is that although Africa gained some grounds in Rio in the provision (or in fact, promise) of some resources for renewable energy, several sections of the final Rio+20 outcome document hardly satisfied delegations from the continent.

Perhaps Africa could be satisfied that it had come away from Rio having ensured that global attention had been refocused on means of implementation of sustainable development targets.

With all this in mind, I think the best thing that Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular, should be doing now, is to bear in mind that the Rio process remains ongoing and ought not be limited to the results of a single meeting.

Africa should revisit its strategies and look ahead to next September’s General Assembly meeting of the UN where they still have the possibility of making their case on all these issues.

.millenniumzimbabwe@yahoo.com/
http://twitter.com/wisdomdzungairi

Of wild fires, rats and smokers

It is winter and veld fires are a common occurrence. Amidst the smoke and strong winds, it is common to see black-shouldered birds patiently perched on power lines and/or tress awaiting rats and mice as they flee the raging fires.
Intense fires destroy thousands acres of vegetation in protected areas such as national parks, forest ranges, major highway sideways and grazing lands across the country annually. Human life, livestock and wild animals have been lost as a result.

The grass fires are a major concern for everyone especially this period through to October; they quickly get out of control and can cause serious damage in agricultural and forested lands.

Forest fire officials encourage people not to light grass fires or burn debris. Burning dry grass in fields or yard debris can spread to nearby forests.

At the weekend government launched the National Fire Awareness Campaign or National Fire Prevention Week at Matabiswana Village in Insuza, Matabeleland North province, to raise responsiveness in the community against starting needless forest fires.

This Forestry Commission initiative is an excellent inventiveness. The campaign will be a waste of resources if stakeholders cannot sustain it and/or spread it across the country given the extent of environmental damage from unwanted forest fires started by people digging for mice and/or hunting for small game such as rabbits as well as throwing out a cigarette stub through the window of a moving vehicle. This is commonplace, but Zimbabwe must develop a culture against littering.

It is also important that the public must consider no-burn options. Many landfills offer designated days when yard debris can be disposed of at little or no cost. The Forestry Commission should also consider advising the public about composting. On-site chipping may be feasible. Limbs and other debris may be piled for wildlife habitat if located where it does not pose a wildfire hazard.

Carelessly lit and tended fires and smoking are a major concern throughout the burning season. In fact, forest guards have seen people triggering fires and in some cases the accused have managed to escape.

The phenomenon, witnessed every year, destroys flora and fauna in vast tracts of the forest area. Zimbabwe did not receive enough rain this year and most areas have gone dry. Dry weather due to absence of moisture in the air causes the fire to spread rapidly.

Without a doubt Zimbabwe’s eucalypt forest has evolved to cope with low and high-intensity bushfires situations. Eucalyptus forests in the country depend on fire for regeneration. However, indigenous forests in Matabeleland, Gokwe’s Mafungautsi Plateau, Chimanimani and many others are much more likely to be destroyed by fire.
The sensitivity of forest communities to fire is the main reason these areas have been listed as threatened under the Forestry Act.

For the record, the Matabiswana launch had its beginning in the US in 1911. It is held annually to commemorate the Great Chicago Fire. On the 40th anniversary (1911) of the Great Chicago Fire, the Fire Marshals Association of North America (FMANA), the oldest membership section of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), sponsored the first National Fire Prevention Day, deciding to observe the anniversary as a way to keep the public informed about the importance of fire prevention.

In May 1919, when the NFPA held its 23rd annual meeting in Ottawa at the invitation of the Dominion Fire Prevention Association (DFPA), the NFPA and DFPA both passed resolutions urging governments in the US and Canada to support the campaign for a common Fire Prevention Day.

This was expanded to Fire Prevention Week in 1922. The NFPA that has officially sponsored Fire Prevention Week since its inception selects the annual theme for Fire Prevention Week.

When US President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed the first National Fire Prevention Week on October 4–10 1925, he noted that in the previous year some

15 000 lives were lost to fire in the US. Calling the loss “startling”, Coolidge’s proclamation stated: “This waste results from the conditions which justify a sense of shame and horror; for the greater part of it could and ought to be prevented . . . It is highly desirable that every effort be made to reform the conditions which have made possible so vast a destruction of the national wealth.”

In Canada, the first national Fire Prevention Day proclamation was issued by the Governor-General in 1919. The Great Chicago Fire was a conflagration that burned from Sunday, October 8 to early Tuesday, October 10, 1871, killing hundreds and destroying about
9 km² in Chicago, Illinois.

On the flag of Chicago, the second star commemorates the fire. The exact cause was never determined. The traditional account of the origin of the fire is that it was started by a cow kicking over a lantern in the barn owned by Patrick and Catherine O’Leary.

In 1893, Michael Ahern, the Chicago Republican reporter who wrote the O’Leary account, admitted he had made it up as “colourful copy”. The barn was the first building to be consumed by the fire, but the official report could not determine the exact cause of it.

The fire’s spread was aided by a drought prior to the fire and strong winds from the south-west that carried flying embers towards the heart of Chicago. Furthermore, the city did not react quickly enough, and at first, residents were not concerned about it, not realising the high risk of conditions.
City officials estimated that more than 300 people died in the fire and over 100 000 were left homeless.

millenniumzimbabwe@yahoo.com/http://twitter.com/wisdomdzungairi

Of leaders and green laggards

The historic Rio+20 summit has come and gone, but it was hard to find a happy soul at the end of the environmental conference — North and South.

Not within the legion of bleary-eyed government negotiators from the 191 nations who met in an abortive attempt to find a breakthrough at the United Nations conference on sustainable development.
Again, not among the thousands of activists who denounced the summit that ended last week as “dead on arrival”. Not even organisers of the UN’s largest-ever event.

UN secretary-general of the conference Sha Zukang summed the mood of the delegates saying: “This is an outcome that makes nobody happy. My job was to make everyone equally unhappy.”

And so, in the end Rio+ 20 became a conference to decide to have even more conferences. At least it’s good for the government negotiators, politicians and hangers on because it will leave them with an extra dollar from their daily subsistence allowances (DSA).

Poignantly, that result was hailed as a success by the 100 heads of state who attended the event. Why?

Because given how environmental summits have failed in recent years as global economic turmoil squashes political will to take on climate and conservation issues, the mere fact of agreeing to talk again in the future constituted victory.

After the summit last week, I spoke to a top government bureaucrat, who indicated the result fell short on many fronts. What came out clear is that the outcome of the conference simply means both developing and rich countries’ leaders are laggards. How could they contend with rescheduling future summits than tangible results in the face of environment ruin?

Faced with the real prospect of complete failure, negotiators who struggled for months to hammer out a more ambitious final document ended up opting for the lowest common denominator. Just hours before Rio+20 meeting opened, they agreed on a proposal that makes virtually no progress beyond what was signed at the original 1992 Earth Summit, removing the kind of contentious proposals activists contend were required to avoid an environmental meltdown.

The South Centre Policy executive director and a member of the UN Committee on Development Martin Khor said: “We’ve sunk so low in our expectations that reaffirming what we did 20 years ago is now considered a success.”

Why is it that we share a common future, but so little common ground?

Perhaps, the result from the lacklustre Rio+20 is that political leaders and their delegates in their wisdom or lack of it declined to bequeath it one of the grandiloquent titles normally attached to such things. It was not a Rio+20 Declaration, nor even a “roadmap”.

It was basically, clumsily, unimpressively — a “Rio+20 Outcomes Document”.

One can therefore deduce that the easy answer to the question of why government delegations could not aim higher was that the result reflected deep and stark divisions between developing and developed countries. And to some extent that was true.

Consequently, according to the Rio+20 Summit Outcomes, the word “reaffirm” is used 59 times in the 49-page document titled The Future We Want.
They 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).

Some of the major issues activists wanted to see in the document that didn’t make it in included a call to end subsidies for fossil fuels, language underscoring the reproductive rights of women, and some words on how nations might mutually agree to protect the high seas, areas that fall outside any national jurisdictions.

For example the concept of the green economy, originally intended to be at the heart of Rio+20 summit was supposed to put the world back on track to place sustainability at the heart of economic decision-making.

But developing countries including Zimbabwe saw it differently. President Robert Mugabe for starters, pointed out that money to transition to the green economy does not by and large grow on trees. Like many leaders in the developing world, the leaders were wary of anything that might impose rules on how they should develop.

Nevertheless, a simple “them and us” analysis of the failings of Rio+20 overlooked an important difference between 2012 and the time of the original Rio Earth Summit 20 years ago. Nor does it even do justice to the nuances of the green economy debate.

The world has changed and consequently so too has what one delegate termed “the arithmetic” of international negotiation, making the task of achieving consensus much harder.

We live in a world where environmental leadership on various issues is not solely the domain of developed countries, for example the country’s forest protection, land degradation, panning and reforestation efforts and our landmark climate change policy currently being debated among others.

Yes the leaders shared powerful examples of sustainable development in action. But what can make a difference are serious, implementable initiatives that will advance sustainable development. Going forward, these commitments must galvanise action where it really matters – on the ground.

millenniumzimbabwe@yahoo.com/http://twitter.com/wisdomdzungairi

Rio+20 summit — a hoax?

Rio de Janeiro is the birthplace of the United Nations Earth Summit.So it seems appropriate that the giant beast of sustainable development negotiations should go there to die. And where New World Vultures smelt the wounded and circle overhead.

The UN Earth Summit was first held in Rio in June 1992. Over 191 governments took part along with
2 500 representatives of NGOs while 20 000 people attended the parallel, consultative event –the ForumGlobal.

The first summit delivered the Climate Change Convention. It was ambitious — laying the foundation of the Kyoto Protocol and the Convention on Biological Diversity. There the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, which established 27 sustainable development principles, Agenda 21 and the Forest Principles were also agreed.

More importantly the first Earth Summit represented a message of hope.

Environmental concerns, from climate change to biodiversity were no longer the obsessions of green pressure groups. Global solutions were now being sought by global governments.

Former US president George H W Bush made an unexpected appearance at the summit and the newly elected British Prime Minister John Major was an enthusiastic and engaged lead for the UK delegation.

For many environmental NGOs, it was a miracle birth. For some corporations, it represented a real threat. But here we are, 20 years later, with the UN hosting the Rio+20, the largest event of its kind with sustainable development dominating the agenda.

Yet something has changed. Instead of injecting new life into the Earth Summit process, the atmosphere was one of sombre acceptance or outright grief. At the end indications are this Rio+20 will go down as the “hoax summit”.

They came, they talked, but they failed to act. Paralysed by inertia and in hock to vested interests, too many leaders were unable to join up the dots and solve the connected crisis of environment, equality and economy.

From the outset indications were that Rio+20 was never going to generate the sort of landmark accords signed at the 1992 Earth Summit.
Although the summit attracted over 50 000 people, many were disappointed that nearly 100 leaders made few specific commitments on issues ranging from energy to food security to oceans.

Reports say throughout the negotiations, the streets of central Rio and surrounding the suburban conference hall that hosted the summit were littered with demonstrations by activists ranging from Indian tribes to environmentalists to anti-nuclear protesters.

Instead of forging legally binding treaties, organisers pointed out, the purpose of the summit was to initiate a process to define a new set of development principles.

But that process, like most global diplomacy, is rife with conflicting interests and tensions between rich countries and the developing world. The storyline was certainly different from 1992. The summit recognised more than the others that not one size fits all.

President Robert Mugabe, who attended the 1992 Earth Summit, like many other leaders this time around used his time at the podium to note the markedly different needs Zimbabwe is struggling with, especially compared with the developed world. While leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa themselves big emerging nations, spoke of their need to catch up with rich countries. Yet others like Bolivia, Iran and Cuba unleashed traditional rants against capitalism and conventional definitions of growth.

One point of contention was what many emerging nations believe is a need for a global fund that could assist them pursue development goals.
Early talk of a $30 billion fund for that purpose as a possible outcome of the summit foundered.

The grand failure of Rio+20 is a reminder that short-term corporate profit rules over the interests of people. There was no doubt that Rio+20 was indeed showing signs of “rigor mortis”.

Sadly, US president Barack Obama, who was elected on a wave of euphoria at the departure of George W Bush was “too busy” fighting an election to bring presidential gravitas to the forum. On the other hand, UK premier David Cameron was caught up in the immediacy of the economic crisis tearing through Europe to turn his attention to the future ecological crisis affecting the planet.
If not dead, then Rio+20 is certainly suffering from Locked-in Syndrome, paralysed but with some signs of life around the eyes.

Brazil’s Environment minister Izabella Teixeira said it was important the negotiating process kept going, perhaps to a Rio+40.

Civil society groups from across the globe were quick to condemn world leaders — particularly from rich countries — for failing to live up to their promises or offer new vision.

Augustine Njamnshi of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, a pan-continental alliance of over 300 movements and networks to amplify African voices on climate change said: “Africa is at the forefront of the interlinked crises facing humanity: a broken economic system that kills the planet leaves millions in poverty scrambling for the most basic essence of human dignity. And yet developed countries’ governments came here and have not been able to live up to their meager promises on resources for sustainable development. Is this what we call renewed political commitment?”

Thus, the conference, which ended with more set piece speeches from leaders, saw the summit closing with what was widely considered a lackluster agreement, leaving many attendees convinced that individuals and companies, rather than governments, should lead efforts to improve the environment.

The reasons are that lack of consensus over those goals in Rio de Janeiro led to the agreement that even some signatory countries said lacked commitment, specifics and measurable targets.

Clearly, a series of much-hyped global summits on environmental policy has now fallen short of expectations, going back at least to a 2009 UN meeting in Copenhagen that ended in near chaos; Mexico in 2010 and Durban 2011 which went into extra time.

As a result, it tells us that progress on environmental issues must be made locally with the private sector and without the help of international accords.

Finally, the roster of promises issued at the end of the summit could be described as “pallid or gutless”.

millenniumzimbabwe@yahoo.com/http://twitter.com/wisdomdzungairi