EDITORIAL - Rio+20

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also called the 2012 Earth Summit and Rio+20, opens this week in Rio de Janeiro with ambitious goals. The gathering, hosted by Brazil 20 years after the first Earth Summit was held in the same city, seeks to commit governments to the development of a “green economy” and to strike a balance between economic growth and environmental protection.

Rio+20 also seeks to draw up sustainable development goals – the environmental protection equivalent of the UN Millennium Development Goals – that governments can commit to achieve over a certain period. A new way of classifying the progress and wealth of nations is also being considered. Beyond gross domestic product, Rio+20 seeks to incorporate natural capital in a so-called Inclusive Wealth Indicator.

As in previous years, the bone of contention is whether the heavier burden of saving the planet should be borne by the developing world or the advanced economies. At the very least, developing countries want green technology transfer and financial support from industrialized nations, apart from significant cuts in the fossil fuel consumption of the richest countries led by the United States.

The response of the rich can be gleaned from the expected absence from the summit of US President Barack Obama, who is sending Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Rio while he ostensibly concentrates on his reelection campaign. Several members of the European Union, grappling with the continuing financial crisis in the eurozone, are also cool to the position of developing countries.

Still, there can be some progress in any gathering of about 50,000 participants from 190 countries – the largest ever for the UN – with 130 heads of government attending. For the first time, the head of the International Monetary Fund is attending an Earth Summit, indicating the importance attached by multilateral institutions to environmental issues and sustainable development.

President Aquino has sent a delegation led by Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan. World leaders who are skipping the summit probably feel that the summit topics are too broad and unwieldy to be sufficiently tackled in three days. But the participation of a head of state or government can speed up the implementation of the doables in sustainable development goals. There will be several such doables that President Aquino, even with his absence from Rio+20, can commit his administration to implement. As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, the Earth Summit “is too important to fail.”