“Alarm and concern” at Rio

Stephen Lacey at Think Progress‘s climate blog notes that activist groups are dismayed at the direction the Rio negotiations have taken: After working through the night on Monday, international negotiators agreed on a framework for “sustainable development goals” that could help guide a wide-range of policies on issues like poverty eradication, clean energy deployment, sustainable ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

Stephen Lacey at Think Progress's climate blog notes that activist groups are dismayed at the direction the Rio negotiations have taken:

Stephen Lacey at Think Progress‘s climate blog notes that activist groups are dismayed at the direction the Rio negotiations have taken:

After working through the night on Monday, international negotiators agreed on a framework for “sustainable development goals” that could help guide a wide-range of policies on issues like poverty eradication, clean energy deployment, sustainable cities, and fisheries management. But with very few specifics on how to actually implement these sustainability goals, the text has angered almost every single civil society group observing the negotiations.

“The overall response from the NGO community to the negotiations is one of alarm and concern,” said Jeffrey Huffines, a representative for Non-Governmental Organizations to the United Nations. “Our concern is that the means of implementation are not clearly articulated.”

In other words, there’s very little in the text that would get us from here to there.

David Nussbaum of the World Wildlife Fund argues here that the negotiations have demonstrated the power of the G77 grouping:

The G77, a political grouping of the least developed countries who work together to increase their impact and influence (the ‘77’ is misleading as the group actually numbers around 130 – sometimes joined by China, sometimes not), are pretty happy with the text.

This is mainly because they don’t want environmental protection to mean any impact on their prospects for economic growth.

And if the G77 are to be cajoled into developing green economies, they want the rich countries (the OECD) to pay for it.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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