What on Earth has happened since Rio?

The world went to Rio in 1992 with real hope of cleaning up, but the new Earth Summit is already bogged down, arguing protocol and battling countries - such as Australia - which oppose greenhouse targets. JAMES WOODFORD reports from New York.

It was the perfect setting for a conspiracy theory. At the end of an empty, unlit hall, in a tired-looking building next to the United Nations complex, Dr Marie-Jeanne Ferrari waited to register as a delegate to a potentially crucial gathering of world leaders, bureaucrats and environmentalists - Earth Summit II, the first follow-up to the environment conference held in Rio de Janeiro five years ago.

Dr Ferrari is the Children's Fund of Canada's representative to the UN and her theory is that the developed world wants to seize land off the developing world. Environmentalism, with its goals of wilderness and depopulation, is the vehicle for the land grab, resulting in the seizure of property belonging to third-world families. According to Ferrari, the central myth of the conspiracy is over-population.

She says with complete seriousness that the entire population of the world could fit easily into Texas, with everybody still having a frontyard and a backyard.

For Ferrari the biggest disaster that could befall humanity at next week's Earth Summit would be a decision to take radical action to protect the environment - slash greenhouse gas emissions and lock up any more land in wilderness areas.

But by the end of this week, with world leaders including US President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl all journeying to the New York meeting, Dr Ferrari was a lobbyist with little to worry about. Australian Prime Minister John Howard, occupied with a meeting between himself and former British Prime Minister, Baroness Thatcher, was not even bothering to turn up. While the world's most powerful nations were sending their heads of state, Australia will send the Federal Minister for the Environment, Senator Robert Hill.

By yesterday afternoon, each of the big potential "trophies" that world leaders might have hoped to take home to their domestic constituents were beginning to slip from grasp.

Kohl's push for a forest convention was being howled down by conservationists fearful that yet another international agreement would create more delay of any actual protection of trees.

Australia was proving a major and internationally prominent obstacle to greenhouse gas emission targets and even agreement on whether indigenous communities should be referred to as people or peoples was proving difficult to obtain.

Negotiations have also been complicated by the fact that before the heavyweights of the international stage arrive in New York they will be meeting this weekend in Denver, Colorado, for a GS conference, which will almost certainly address some of the key issues of next week's Earth Summit.

Conservationists are despairing about the direction that Earth Summit II - also known as Rio plus five - seems to be taking. After sitting through five days of the excruciating, soporific haggling by the world's bureaucrats preparing the ground for the arrival of their heads of state, green groups are beginning to question the worth of the meeting.

The director of the US-based National Wildlife Federation, Ms Barbara Bramble, said despondently on Wednesday that non- government organisations were feeling saddened by developments in the preliminary negotiations held in the basement of the UN building this week. While workers chipped paint off the wrought-iron fence surrounding the tightly secured UN complex and the sky was hiding above a thick smog, public servants inside were working desperately to ensure that any impacts of agreements reached at the summit have no impact on their governments.

"Maybe it will turn out to be Rio minus five," Bramble told journalists. "What we have got here is very little help and no co-operation."

She says the bargains that were struck in Rio - the centrepiece of which was a 300-page document called Agenda 21, written to be a blueprint for the environmental protection of the planet - have broken down. The promises made by developed nations to assist developing nations financially through the environmentally damaging period of industrialisation have been largely abandoned, with nations such as the US decreasing their aid.

What has depressed conservationists such as Bramble the most is the wrangling about the contents of the two documents that are planned to form the centrepiece of this summit. The most important is a 15-paragraph "political statement" which will be issued officially by Heads of State next week. In its current form, it is littered with what are known in the diplomatic world as "brackets" - statements deemed as unacceptable by one nation or another and surrounded by brackets until a solution to the semantic impasse is resolved.

On Monday evening, the European Union stunned everybody - conservationists and bureaucrats - when it called for amendments to the political statement that actually said something, setting measurable, binding greenhouse gas reduction targets and moving beyond rhetoric on a range of other environmental issues.

However, by Thursday afternoon, a coalition of nations including Canada, Japan and Australia together put forward their own version of the political statement - one that neutered the EU's proposal for agreement to a binding 15 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2010.

Instead the version supported by Australia calls for the Earth Summit to adopt a statement that merely calls for emission controls that are "substantially effective", making no reference to targets.

The second document, called Matters Calling for Action by the General Assembly, will also be crucial to the flavour of the headlines that leaders such as Clinton will receive in recognition of their perceived environmental credibility - or lack of it.

Nearly half a morning was dedicated on Wednesday to negotiations over paragraph 25, with nations opposing the inclusion of the following phrase.

"Given the devastating and irreparable effects that lead poisoning has on children, it is important to continue to give emphasis to eliminating lead worldwide."

Bramble says it is so obvious that such a measure would be simple commonsense that is hard to fathom why any nation would oppose it.

More than 20 minutes was spent arguing about a paragraph which encourages "Governments to take the lead in changing consumption patterns".

Bureaucrats opposed the phrase "take the lead", instead demanding that it be replaced with "have a role".

On Wednesday afternoon the public servants painstakingly dissected sections relating to the alleviation of poverty, while within a 100 metres of the building half a dozen homeless men draped themselves over gardens underneath one of the UN's most famous sculptures - an enormous wall inscribed with words from Isiah: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares. And their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war anymore."

But war, say UN scientists, is what the world is facing unless the management of our environment is fixed.

A report to be issued formally by the UN's Commission on Sustainable Development will next week warn world leaders that humanity faces a global water crisis by the year 2025 caused by pollution and water overuse. While scientists and conservationists have been warning of water wars for a number of years, this report contains the first warning from the UN about the risk of conflict caused by disputes over access to water.

"The analyses show that if many of the current approaches to water management do not change, this will lead to increasing water stress. As scarcities increase, there will be the risk of greater conflict over the water in more than 300 transboundary rivers as well as many underground aquifers," the report warns.

On almost every indicator, except the rate of population growth, the world's environment appears to be facing a grim future. Biodiversity is crashing uncontrollably, the climate is warming, creating an uncertain but potentially catastrophic sea-level rise, fish resources are being over-harvested and only a miraculous improvement in agricultural methods will be able to ensure that adequate food is available for all people next century.

Even though the rate of population growth has slowed, the sheer numbers of humans being born in the world mean that, since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, 450million extra people now live on the planet.

Perhaps the most brutal assessment of the performance of world leaders on environmental matters and of the UN processes came on Thursday afternoon from the President of the UN's General Assembly, Mr Razal Ismail. Ismail was a key player at the Rio Earth Summit and recalled how just five years ago the desire for change was "in the air everywhere".

"1992 was the zenith but since then we have been on the slippery slope of not having any commitment at all," Ismail said.

"We have to wake up one morning and realise that we [the UN] are too slow and too laborious - it takes three years or four years to do anything. The longer it takes the more trees that are cut down and the more fish that are caught in nets that float around the oceans for 80 or 90 years."

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