Climbing a steep Summit. (Essay).

In June I traveled to Rio de Janeiro for an event marking the 10th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit. Hosted by Brazil's President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, "Rio Plus Ten" included meetings on climate change and biological diversity and a "passing of the torch" to President Mbeki of South Africa, who is hosting this year's World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.

Despite two days of bold declarations and stimulating discussions, the spirit of the meetings was hardly upbeat. The enthusiasm that marked the 1992 Earth Summit now seems a distant memory, as deep divides have marked the preparations for Johannesburg. The current U.S. government has maintained unbending opposition to virtually all international agreements and institutions, and the whole notion of global progress now seems up for grabs.

This World Summit comes at a difficult, indeed dangerous, time. Any honest assessment of the 10 years since Rio must conclude, as Worldwatch did in State of the World 2002, that the world has made little progress in addressing the major problems the Rio Summit was intended to tackle. At the Earth Summit, leaders from around the world officially recognized--in two historic treaties on climate change and biological diversity--the profound ways in which human development has gone out of balance with natural systems.

While it was ambitious to expect that profound environmental trends--massive deforestation, biodiversity loss, rapid population growth, to name a few--would be turned around in a single decade, even first steps have proved painful and inadequate. It has taken 10 years, for example, for the world to come close to ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, with its legally binding limits on greenhouse gases. And the number one carbon emitter, the United States, remains on the sidelines. (See "Kyoto protocol close to entering into force," page 10.) The promise of the Convention on Biological Diversity remains largely unfulfilled, and huge swaths of Agenda 21 have been ignored--including government commitments to increase foreign aid to developing countries, which has in fact declined substantially over the last decade.

The underlying conflicts that have prevented progress on these vital global problems were on full display this spring at the final preparatory meeting for the World Summit in Bali. Many nations seemed far more committed to protecting the favors and subsidies available to concentrated economic interests, in agriculture or energy, for example, than in committing real resources to tackle shared problems. Efforts to put additional regulatory teeth and financial muscle into fulfillment of the Rio agenda were not successful, and were put off to a final two months of frantic negotiations before the Summit's opening in late August.

There are a number of key issues that need to be resolved in the draft agreement now on the table: whether to commit to providing clean drinking water to at least half of the 1.1 billion people who now do not have it; whether to commit to significantly reducing the current rate of biodiversity loss; whether to commit to substantially increasing renewable energy's share of the global energy mix; and whether to commit to greater levels of accountability, participation, and openness in the operation of both governments and corporations.

Success on these specific issues will require narrowing the deep rift between industrial and developing nations, which has been widened by the failure of rich countries to deliver on the promises they made a decade ago. Recent decisions by some industrial countries to raise barriers to commodities exported by poor nations, despite rhetoric about free trade, have led to a sense of betrayal that was exacerbated by blanket U.S. opposition to many elements of the Johannesburg action plan during pre-summit negotiations in Bali.

All of which makes for unusually high stakes at the Johannesburg Summit. The world is now dangerously close to reversing decades of progress in international cooperation across a spectrum of issues, despite abundant evidence that virtually no major threat today, from terrorism to economic recession or climate change, can be solved unilaterally or by force of arms.

The sense of despair that would come from a failed World Summit would do much to undermine the sense of global stability that the world has desperately sought to reestablish in the past year. The United States, which has played a lead role in advancing the international rule of law over the past five decades, may hold the largest stake of all.

Hosting the Summit in Johannesburg may serve to remind the world that reforming well-established and deeply entrenched institutions is rarely a short or easy process. Decades of despair and hopelessness--and courageous persistence--preceded the demise of Apartheid a decade ago. As Brazil's President Cardoso said of the World Summit agenda when he spoke in Rio this June, "failure is not an option."