From Foreign Policy
Early in his term, President Carter asked a group of us in his administration to prepare what in 1980 became the “Global 2000 Report to the President.” Our task was to project the population and environmental outcomes that would unfold by 2000 if societies did nothing to change course. The steps governments took over the last two decades represented the first experiment in global environmental governance. That experiment failed. Rates of environmental deterioration continue essentially unabated.
The U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be held in Johannesburg in August, is the latest opportunity to assess progress and plot a course for effective environmental policies. It would be comforting to think that this conference—along with all the summit agreements, international negotiations, conventions, and protocols of the past 20 years—will take us to the point of decisive action. But it won’t. The summit promises to be anything but revolutionary. Meanwhile, environmental problems have gone from bad to worse.
