UNCCD says sustainable development will become a reality
31-Aug-2003: By GUY ROGERS at the 6th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification
SUSTAINABLE development will succeed because it is being propelled by a growing public movement concerned about the the loss of the key securities, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification spokesman Rajeb Boulharouf said yesterday.
In a wide-ranging interview with Planets-Voice, Mr Boulharouf identified the prime mechanisms for turning talk into action the successful installation of institutional mechanisms and a disinclination by the convention’s 190 member states to go “off-side” of global opinion.
But he said the convention was not prepared to bar leaders like Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe – due to arrive in Havana tonight – who are criticised for the damage to sustainable development that their policies are causing.
Asked about the steep budget increase proposal from the convention secretariat, up 63 per cent from the last financial year, which has generated some controversy, he said it needed to be read in the context of the recent slide of the Euro against the dollar to historic lows.
“We do our business in Euros and, independent of our aspirations or our work, we need a 30 per cent increase of the budget just to cover this devaluation.”
The remaining 33 per cent was required to tackle a wide range of proposed tasks -- all established within the convention’s programme of work by the UNCCD members hemselves -- he said.
“Budget debates are always tricky but I can say that this increase in real terms conforms with past budgets. It is not exceptional.”
Critics have said that an unmanageable situation could be nevertheless be developing with a number of developing countries, including some of the worst victims of desertification, now even further unlikely to pay. But Mr Boulhardouf, who is the UNCCD external relations and public affairs co-ordinator, said he did not think this would happen.
“Most of the developing countries are paying timeously. In fact this is the only post-Rio convention of this kind where they are going out of their way to do so. We have a country like Venezuela for instance which has invested one million dollars (R8m) in support of a south-south co-operation project to combat desertification. The African Union has budgeted five hundred thousand dollars (R4000000m), which is unseen, unparallelled.”
Payments are also made according to the UN’s established ability-to-pay scale of contributions and the proportion that these countries pay is relatively small, he argued.
As at the 3rd World Water Forum in Kyoto in March and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in September last year, much of the debate here at the Palacio de las Convenciones is focused how to implement practical, scientific, budgetary and social strategies devised. The UNCCD has taken the unprecedented step of designating a separate committee to focus on this work and the Committee to Review and Implement the Convention (Cric) meets every year as opposed to the convention’s bi-annual gatherings.
Beyond the amusement of such acronyms -- there is also the Committee of the Whole (Cow) and of course the Conference of the Parties (Cop) – the plan seems to be a good one. Cric representatives are required to report back every year, whereas the convention only gathers every two years, and to measure their success against institutionalised benchmarks under the scrutiny of their peers.
Mr Boulharouf the process was working.
“We believe a country that is not fulfilling its pledges will be penalising itself , and that the member states understand this.”
In theory this should mean that the government of this transgressor will struggle to get loans from the Global Environment Facility, which recently put itself forward as a major sponsor of the battle against desertification, or from any of the other UN operational arms of the convention.
Other international sustainable development agreements like climate change for instance with its set emission parameters are easier to monitor. But supported by a network of NGOs serviced by some of the globe’s top brains in the field like Dr Uriel Safriel of Israel, the EU has taken the lead in changing this around. An EU initiative identifying specific countries, areas and timetables is underway aimed at finding clearer measurement tools for desertification, as well as ways to rejuvenate degraded land.
Mr Boulhardouf was also asked about the criticism in some NGO circles here that the secretariat’s laudable aim of involving civil society was being undermined by an invitation list skewed towards only organisations, with flights and accommodation paid for, that would not question convention policy.
He said he disagreed strongly with this criticism.
“We do not designate who comes. It is perhaps not the best process but we rely on networks within individual countries. We have no word on the designatation process. We intervene only in terms of the funding. So I think this criticism is nonsense.”
The UNCCD is furthermore the only body of its kind where an Open Dialogue Session has been instituted where NGOs can interface directly with governments, he noted.
“This is indeed where a great part of the solution, moments of truth, the success stories and the exchange of traditional knowledge, extracted from the heat and the dust, are revealed.”
Several speakers at the conference’s opening plenary on Monday noted that, despite growing awareness and actions, the gulf is widening between the impoverished and the wealthy, a benchmark of sustainable development, due to both human factors like exploding populations and poor land use choices and environmental factors like climate change.
Mr Boulhardouf said he was optimistic that the trend could be turned around, however.
With its genesis little more than a decade ago at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, sustainable development has to overcome centuries of carelessness, ignorence and greed that guided management of our land and water.
“So it’s a process and there are enormous challenges but I’m positive we can succeed. The reason is that it is being driven by a public movement that has a sustainability of its own, people who are concerned that they don’t know any more what they are drinking, what they are eating, how they are travelling. We need to think globally and to act locally. If we do only a single right thing today, we move forward.”
Asked about these challenges in the context of the invitation to the conference extended to Mr Mugabe and other leaders whose policies are seen by many as diametrically opposed to susustainable development in terms of undermining social stability and land care, he said the convention was not in the business of intervening in the internal affairs of member states.
“This is a multilateral process and we believe in the virtues of dialogue.”
Adopted following the Rio Earth Summit, the UNCCD is the only international instrument of law to address the issue of desertification, which is defined as occuring when a piece of land loses its ability to deliver the environmental services -- which might range from erosion and flood prevention to food and clean water production -- that it was delivering before damage occured. Specific human inflicted reasons include decimation of forests and over-grazing.
ends