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The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg during 26 August and 4 September 2002, was the biggest event of its kind organised by the United Nations to date. A major objective of the WSSD was to set out strategies for greater and more effective implementation of Agenda 21, negotiated in Rio ten years ago, than hitherto. An overview of the WSSD is presented in this chapter, including a scrutiny of its major outcomes.

Discussion begins with a detailed account of major UN environmental conferences and related events, such as Doha and Monterrey conferences, that led to the WSSD, followed by a brief discussion of the deliberations that took place at the preparatory meetings (PrepComs) of the WSSD. A detailed account and scrutiny of the following, that are the main outcomes of the WSSD, is then given.

The increasingly important post-Rio issue of globalisation, which has serious implications for a number of issues directly or indirectly impinging on global sustainability, was an important element in the contextual background to the WSSD. Reference is made to some of these implications.

Type II partnerships are an innovation of the WSSD. Although a good deal of confusion persists over their precise nature and , they were nevertheless presented at the WSSD as powerful and more democratic instruments for the realisation of Agenda 21 objectives.

The analysis shows that the Summit contributed at defining sustainable development more precisely. The Plan of Implementation is most instrumental in showing how to make resource use and the generation of pollution less unsustainable. In this way implementing the recommendations of the Johannesburg Summit offers an important defeat, worldwide.

The prominent place of the chapter on poverty in the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPI) is totally in keeping with the priority given to poverty reduction in the development thinking of the international community of today. The Johannesburg process did not lead to any new insights or new commitments in the fight against poverty. Section one sets out a factual comparison of the poverty chapters in Rio’s Agenda 21(AG21) and in the JPI. Section two reviews the conceptual links between poverty reduction and sustainable development, since poverty is used both as a dependent and as an independent variable. This analysis shows a shift in the function of growth as related to environmental protection. Section three explores the “naturalization” of development thinking in its economic and social dimensions and shows how this affects the policy options for social protection. I also explain how social and environmental sustainability have become elements of risk management and how are both aimed at conflict prevention and enhanced growth. Finally, in section four three lines of action are suggested to enhance the emergence of a socially meaningful sustainable development agenda that, ideally, would make poverty reduction strategies redundant.

At the World Summit on Sustainable Development, world leaders agreed that eliminating unsustainable production and consumption is one of the three overriding objectives of sustainable development. Achieving that objective should have been a major priority for the WSSD Plan of Implementation. Increases in consumption and production over the past decade were largely responsible for the worsening environmental and social trends. Unfortunately, the negotiators of the Plan paid insufficient attention to the lessons from ten years of discussions about the concepts, the available policies and tools and their effectiveness, the impacts of those policies on developing countries, and the political commitment of countries in an era of globalisation. Despite a promising proposal for a new ten-year work programme aimed at bridging the gap implementing the Agenda 21 commitments from Rio, Summit negotiators produced barely more than a muted echo of recommendations from the past which have yet to be taken seriously enough by the world’s leaders in a comprehensive intergovernmental strategy. In the ten-year review of progress to achieve sustainable production and consumption, governments quickly skipped past the critical work of examining things are getting worse, avoiding the task of identifying the obstacles (which in some cases were themselves) and in turn avoiding the commitment to time-bound measurable targets. If nothing else, the World Summit on Sustainable Development demonstrated that a global strategy to achieve sustainable production and consumption will come not from a UN consensus of world leaders but from a strategic alliance of responsible governments, civil society, and others with a vision beyond the next election cycle.

Water is a precious yet non-renewable resource. Yet in Africa, the same water can be a source of life and death. Water is not only the most basic of need but also at the centre of sustainable development and essential for poverty eradication. Water is intimately linked to health, agriculture, energy and biodiversity. Without progress on water, reaching other Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will be difficult if not impossible. The fight against poverty will remain a pipe dream.

A lot of activities have been undertaken with the aim of highlighting the importance of water, linking water with sustainable development and indeed developing strategies for resolving the ever-increasing problems of water. These include the adoption of the Africa Water Vision in The Hague, Netherlands in March, 2000.

In order to address the many problems of water in Africa especially related to the coordination of the increasing number of initiatives in the Water sector in Africa, the African Water Task Force (AWTF) was established.

As part of developing solutions to the African water crisis, the AWTF held a regional conference in Accra Ghana. Some of the emerging issues from the Accra Conference are highlighted in the Accra declaration.

This paper highlights the linkages between water and sustainable development, water and poverty and the many facets that relate to water. It mainly addresses issues of water from the African perspective. A number of key events that have taken place and which have served as a basis for many policy pronouncements have been given.

The last section concentrates on what happened to water at the World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg in September 2002.

This paper presents a framework for understanding energy issues in the context of sustainable development. It posits that there are three important ways in which energy is related to sustainable development: (a) energy as a source of environmental stress, (b) energy as a principal motor of macroeconomic growth and (c) energy as a prerequisite for meeting basic human needs. These three dimensions correspond to the three dimensions of the often-used triangle of sustainable development: environmental, economic, and social. Using this framework, the paper traces how successive environmental summits at Stockholm (1972), Rio de Janeiro (1992) and Johannesburg (2002) have dealt with energy issues. It identifies a slow, surprising and important evolution of how energy issues have been treated at these global discussions. Energy has received increasing prominence at these meetings and become more firmly rooted in the framework of sustainable development. Stockholm was primarily concerned with the environmental dimension, Rio de Janeiro focused on both the environmental and economic dimensions, and the major headway made at Johannesburg was the meaningful addition of the social dimension and the linking of energy issues to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

This chapter traces the growth of global actions related to the management of chemicals and hazardous wastes since the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, through the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, and projections into the future as far as 2020. It is important to understand this relationship, since the groundwork for essentially all of the recommendations found in the Article 23 of the Plan of Implementation from Johannesburg is found in Chapter 19 of Agenda 21.

Significant progress has been made in understanding the risks associated with chemical exposure and in how to manage those risks to effectively reduce the threat to human health and the environment. The Plan of Implementation calls for transparency and accessibility in sharing this information with all countries and assistance to developing countries, and countries with economies in transition, in establishing the capacity for sound management of chemicals within their borders. Ratification of the Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions is called for by 2003 and 2004, respectively. Full implementation of the new Globally Harmonised System for classifying and labelling chemicals is sought by 2008. Attention is given to risks posed by heavy metals, with a particular focus on the health and environmental effects of mercury and efforts to reduce anthropogenic releases. Finally, the Bahia Declaration and Priorities for Action beyond 2000 are used as examples of a strategic global approach to management of chemicals.

Chemistry must play a central role in reducing poverty and improving standards of living by more efficient and sustainable use of resources than is the case today as outlined in Principle 8 of the Rio Declaration. All of the actions called for in Article 23 of the Plan of Implementation are achievable and the time frames specified are reasonable. Progress to date has demonstrated the potential for effective cooperation between private industry, governments, international groups, and non-governmental organisations, yet much remains to be done, particularly in the area of Green Chemistry.

Health and sustainable development are mutually dependent: neither is possible without the other. Health is determined by many factors: hereditary; life-style; the level of education; work; the social community; the effects of the natural environment. The greatest health-related threat to sustainable development comes from infections (diarrhoea, respiratory infections, AIDS, tuberculosis and childhood infections and malaria) and psychiatric disorders, particularly depression, but including schizophrenia (madness). Infection and psychiatric disorders are given too little importance in the Johannesburg declaration. Development is not without problems that affect health: increased population stressing the food supplies; changing disease patterns; the marginalisation of vulnerable groups who tend to have poorer health, nutrition, education, access to help or little control of their circumstances; corruption; unjust trade and other economic decisions; inappropriate education and international aid; bias towards the provision of health services while ignoring the factors affecting health; unthinking introduction of western beliefs and practices; traffic fumes and accidents; and industrial and domestic pollution. Many of these problems are tackled in the declaration in some measure, but the declaration is unbalanced in its approach, focussing on minor issues to the detriment of important health matters. However, the processes to change in both health and development are the same and operate across society. Achieving sustainable development and improving health at the same time is attainable, but may take a major investment by the developing countries. The Western nations cannot be relied upon to contribute wisely and unselfishly to health and development in the rest of the world.

This paper explores the status of sustainable development in small island developing states (SIDS), through the presentation of a case study on the Maldives, which is a typical small island developing state in the Central Indian Ocean. At the outset, a brief history of sustainable development as related to SIDS on the international agenda is outlined, starting from Rio to Barbados to Johannesburg. SIDS are expected to face many challenges and constraints in pursuing sustainable development due to their ecological fragility and economic vulnerability. It is the position of this paper that issues related to environmental vulnerability are of the greatest concern. A healthy environment is the basis of all life-support systems, including that of human well-being and socio-economic development. Priority environmental problems are: climate change and sea-level rise, threats to biodiversity, threats to freshwater resources, degradation of coastal environments, pollution, energy and tourism. Among these, climate change and its associated impacts are expected to pose the greatest threat to the environment and therefore to sustainable development. For small islands dependent on fragile marine ecosystems, in particular on coral reefs, for their livelihoods and living space, adverse effects of climate change such as increased frequency of extreme weather events and sea-level rise will exacerbate the challenges they already face. It is concluded that the ‘paper’ path from Rio to Barbados to Johannesburg has made significant progress. However, much remains to be done at the practical level, particularly by the developed countries in terms of new and additional efforts at financial and technical assistance, to make sustainable development a reality for SIDS.

The paper gives an overview on the transformation process of 10 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries leading to a change of political structure and the emergence of market mechanisms. These countries intend to get admission into the European Union (EU) in the near future. Therefore, the legal system of the EU is the standard for them and, in particular, they follow the respective environmental protection measures.

The implementation of sustainable development is a new challenge for the CEE countries. Beside environmental protection, economic and social dimensions are also to be considered, and these three pillars are in mutual interaction. In the CEE countries, the preparations to implement elements of sustainable development began in the last few years. Thus,the documents of the Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development stimulate this recent process. The successful implementation requires the close cooperation of the governments, the various stakeholders and the civil society.

Latin America comprehends notable variations in terms of natural environment, availability of natural resources, living standards, and demographic patterns. Latin America is a mosaic of cultures, post-and pre-Columbian. The rich variety of life forms discovered and described by chroniclers and traveling naturalists in the Neotropics contributed to the proposal, in mid-XVIIIth century, of a new system of classification and a scientific code of nomenclature for all organisms. Biodiversity was, for many centuries, a source of resources to be exploited . In scientific circles, its inventory became the domain of taxonomists. But modern technology showed how important the miriad of life forms really are as sources of chemical molecules to be engineered as drugs and reassembled as novel manufactured products. We are on the brink of a new agricultural and medical revolution, thanks to the techniques of genetic engineering, which will lead eventually to the elimination of hunger and malnutrition.

In this essay, the Brazilian environmental and social heterogeneity will serve as an example to illustrate some key points, which have influenced sustainability policies. The Amazon deforestation and indigenous knowledge (IK), subjects often associated with areas of high biodiversity, are usually the focus of environmental debates. The importance of IK in integrating development, reducing poverty and sustainability are considered together with the intellectual property rights of native populations.

In the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) Implementation Plan, a few paragraphs were dedicated to Latin America, because of the pre-existing Action Platform on the Road to Johannesburg 2002, approved in Rio de Janeiro in October 2001. This paper calls attention to the need to draw up specific environmental policies for a region which shows an extremely high cultural and biological diversity, associated with a high availability of forests and water, among other resources.