( UW MONITOR

UNCED and beyond

UNU Monitor is a quarterly review of the current research, publications and forthcoming projects of the United Nations University [UNU] in the area of global environmental change. Related activities of other institutions active in the ‘Human Dimensions of Global Change Programme’ are also reported. The Monitor is compiled by the UNU Academic Division in Tokyo. As the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) is taking place in June 1992, this issue’s natural theme is ‘UNCED and beyond’. With the UNU the lead agency for UNCED in the area of its Mountain Agenda, this Monitor will start with an overview of the Mountain Ecology and Sustainable Development Programme, followed by accounts of other recent and planned activities, as well as a contribution of the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Studies [IFIAS] on UNCED’s ‘Earth Charter’. For further information on UNU’s global change agenda, contact Mr Dieter Koenig or Dr Juha Uitto, UNU, Toho-Semei-Building, 15-1 Shibuya 2-chome, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150, Japan.

Mountain Agenda 1992 The United Nations University has been charged with the task of leading the preparation of the Mountain Agenda 1992 for UNCED. This major task has occupied the researchers of the UNU research and training programme on Mountain Ecology and Sustainable Development since last year. The aim is to create wider awareness of the significance of mountain areas to the global environment and the threats posed to the mountains and highlands by human activities. It is hoped that this work will contribute to bringing about international approval of an action plan to promote sustainable development in the mountain regions of the world. The Mountain Agenda will comprise two documents: a comprehensive overview of environ- mental and development issues in the mountain areas entitled Status Report of the World’s Mountains, and the Appeal Document summarizing the action required on the part of the international community. The work is sup- ported financially by the Swiss and German governments.

The work on which the Mountain Agenda is based has a long history at the UNU. The present Mountain Ecology and Sustainable Development Programme is a long- standing collaborative effort between the UNU and the International Mountain Society (IMS) under the lead- ership of the programme coordinators, two prominent mountain scientists and geographers, Professor Jack D. Ives of the University of California, Davis, and Professor Bruno Messerli of University of Berne in Switzerland. Over the years, the Programme has benefited from the participation of virtually all leading scholars throughout the world concerned with the ecological, social and econo- mic development of mountain and highland regions.

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The Programme, launched in 1978, is concerned with the promotion of research and the effective dissemination of research findings advancing sustainable and indigenous development within mountainous regions. It focuses on the development of interdisciplinary methods and sys- tematic approaches for the management of complex mountain ecosystems that will help to combine the often conflicting objectives of conservation and development.

Research within the programme has been carried out in a wide variety of geographic regions with particular emph- asis on the highland areas in the developing parts of the world, including the Himalayas, the Hengduan mountains and the highlands of north-west Thailand in Asia; Mt Kenya, the Ethiopian highlands and the Atlas Mountains in Africa; and the Andes in South America. A major new research project focusing on the high mountain transect of Asia reaching from the Pamirs in the west through the Himalayas to the Hengduan mountains in the east has been prepared. Within this framework, a field workshop with financial support from the Ford Foundation was hosted in October 1991 by the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences in China. Its objective was to examine the problems of rural poverty, minority peoples and sustain- able development in the region. In the first instance, the research activities of the new project will concentrate on the Himalayas in India and Nepal.

The Programme is concerned with institution building in developing countries. A series of regional mountain work- shops has been organized, including conferences on ‘Transformation of mountain environments - regional development and sustainability: Consequences of global change’, held in Armenia in 1989; ‘African mountains and highlands: Dynamics of resource use systems and its

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consequences for sustainable development’, Morocco, 1990; and most recently on ‘Mountain geoecology of the Southern Andes: Resource management and sustainable development’, Chile, 1991. More regional workshops are planned in the future focusing on different regions. The workshops have been instrumental in establishing and supporting regional associations of mountain scholars, such as the African Mountain Association and the Andean Mountain Association.

The research results are disseminated through a number of books and other publications. The two periodical publications published under the Programme together with the IMS are important channels for networking in the field. The journal Mountain Research and Development comes out with four issues annually and provides a leading channel of publishing scientific reports dealing with moun- tain development. Four hundred subscriptions of the journal are provided free of charge to Third World countries. The World Mountain Network Newsletter was first issued in December 1990 as a forum for exchange of news and views on relevant issues.

Building on this significant body of accumulated know- ledge, the researchers of UNU, IMS and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) are in a position of preparing the Mountain Agenda 1992 which will provide solid guidance to decision makers from governments and international organizations as well as groups of concerned individuals coming to Rio in June 1992 on how to attain sustainable development in the often neglected and marginal mountain areas of the world.

Juha I. Uitto The United Nations University

Tokyo, Japan

Global environmental ethics: towards an Earth Charter One of the most focused activities of the growing Global Environmental Ethics research community is in making contributions to a proposed ‘Earth Charter’, which is one of the documents for potential adoption at the ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio in June 1992. The idea for a Charter began to evolve in the earliest preparatory meetings for UN- CED, and has now become one of the major areas of UNCED activity.

Over the past few years, the general idea of foundation- al charters or declarations has spread thoughout many jurisdictions. One initial problem is that different people have different images of what a charter can or ought to do. The American Declaration of Independence is one such famous document, but others include the Magna Carta (a legal agreement), the Charters for the Hudson’s Bay and East India Companies, declarations of intent, monastic rules, and documents that merely exhort, celebrate, or re-affirm. In working towards an Earth Charter, two different constituencies have become involved. The first constituency wishes to see the Charter become a legal

instrument of some sort, and the foundational model to which they appeal is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The second constituency would like the Charter to be a more philosophical and even poetic document, to which the emerging Earth community could dedicate itself.

These alternatives are, of course, not necessarily mutually exclusive, as the Universal Declaration of Hu- man Rights itself proves, but there is a tension between the constituencies, which has revealed itself during the complex, and somewhat haphazard, drafting process. Moreover, more recently, a third constituency of primarily developing countries has entered into the process, attemp- ting to shift the primary focus of attention from an environmental charter to a charter for social and economic justice.

At each stage in the UNCED process, various partici- pants have put forward complete draft Charters, partial Charters, or specific suggestions. These have included members of the world’s religious communities (repre- sented internationally by the World Council of Churches, the World Conference on Religion and Peace, and the International Coordinating Committee on Religion and the Earth), specific groups (eg the Baha’i), philosophical and scientific committees (including members of the Hu- man Dimensions of Global Change Programme Global Environmental Ethics Working Group and the ICSU preparatory committees for ASCEND and AGENDA 21), global NGOs (eg IUCN’s new ‘Caring for the Earth’ Strategy), and national UNCED planning groups (eg the US Citizens Coalition and the Canadian Preparatory Committee for UNCED). Legal working groups on cer- tain aspects of the Charter and other UNCED documents have been established by UNEP and others, including national government groups preparing for the UNCED negotiations. UNCED itself has been engaged in putting together material from already existing international agreements, especially the Stockholm Declaration, to serve as an agreed-upon base for going forward. These drafts and suggestions are, in the first instance, being funnelled to the UNCED Preparatory Committee Work- ing Group III on Legal, Financial, Instrumental, and Institutional Agreements.

What is emerging from this complicated process is a hybrid document, in two parts, the first being a Preamble, and the second part a Statement of General Principles. It is widely expected that the Charter will be relatively short and straightforward, which makes the drafting of each clause and phrase particularly important. Generally speak- ing, there is much more flexibility in the wording of the Preamble, although it will inevitably affect the tone and scope of the rest of the document. Perhaps of more importance in the long term will be the mechanism whereby the Charter is publicized and ratified around the planet. The drafting process and the tight deadline for contributions means that there has been little or no chance for broad public input to the Charter; and if it is to become a touchstone or a rallying point for the emerging global community, ways must be found of enriching’ the bare

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not be allowed to oppose global responsibility for the

common good and the global “commons” ‘. Perhaps the largest area of controversy relates, as

mentioned above, to the balancing of environmental issues with development issues, which is, after all, the main UNCED theme. The government of Malaysia even prop- osed a boycott of the Rio meeting simply because it saw it as a venue for attacking developing countries on their environmental policies. What this underscores is that the Rio meeting is inevitably laced with very powerful moral claims and counterclaims about the ethics of development and underdevelopment, about who is responsible for the environmental crisis, and the sharing of the burden of responsibility. To handle these ethical issues in such a way that the Earth Summit does not collapse in rancour and open conflict is one task that the Charter drafters may see themselves fulfilling; though the Charter itself can only be one element in the complex set of negotiations.

In light of this, one facet of the Earth Charter which is of growing importance is the concept of it as the expression of the movement towards a ‘global community conversa- tion’, of which UNCED is only the starting point. In other words, rather than seeing UNCED as ‘20 Years After Stockholm’, it could be seen as ‘20 Years Before . , .‘. The Earth Charter would need to embody not only principles of ecological justice, but also a reconsideration of what constitutes an equitable process for coming to equitable conclusions. This ethical focus on the process itself, on the barriers and obstacles to full participation in the global conversation, may well turn out to be the most powerful and enduring contribution of Earth Charter work to date.

For more information on the UNCED Earth Charter, contact your official national committee for UNCED, or Peter Timmerman, Convenor, Global Environmental Ethics Working Group, IFIAS/HDGCP, 39 Spadina Road, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

bones of the document. One suggestion is that the Charter should be supplemented by a ‘supporting wheel’ of state- ments from different religious, philosophical, scientific communities, thus enabling the special languages and symbols of different cultures to find room for expression. Another is to use the ratification process as a more global drafting expression, with a revised Charter meeting to be held in 1993 or 1994.

In any case, there are currently a number of draft Charters and related suggestions that have been proposed. As one example, the Working Group of the Religious Communities on UNCED proposed in August 1991 a set of recommendations and draft principles entitled One Earth Community, drawn from the earlier work that has already been mentioned. These are designed to incorpo- rate ‘our shared convictions about the unity of the human family and the oneness of Earth and the particular beliefs of our various religious traditions’. The underlying theme is of ‘one earth community’ as ‘our greatest gift and sacred trust’ which calls us ‘to receive this gift gratefully, to draw on Earth’s sustenance carefully, and to share it equitably’. Principles include:

0 Responsibility to Earth as a whole. 0 The indivisibility of ecological justice and social justice. 0 The rights of future generations. 0 Full participation of individuals and groups in global

decision making. 0 Affirming the ‘polluter pays’ principle as an interna-

tional standard. 0 Affirming the principle of precautionary/preventive

action.

One area of controversy in the Charter is whether it should speak only for and about human beings, or whether it should affirm in some fashion the intrinsic - or even sacred - value of Nature and the other species with which human beings share the planet. It is fair to say that most of the official documents are almost exclusively concerned with human beings, and much of the legal and philosophical grounding for these documents draws on long-standing ‘human rights’ and ‘international law’ language.

Different nations and NGOs have made a variety of

Peter Timmerman, IFIAS

New initiatives: the research agenda beyond UNCED

contributions or objections. The G77 countries, led by China, argue that the document should include statements referring to the need for developed countries to address their ‘unsustainable patterns of production and consump- tion’ and that there should be ‘the transfer of adequate, new, and additional financial resources to developing countries’. A delegate from Burkina Faso to the 3rd PrepComm remarked that ‘poverty has given rise to all the problems we face’. The US position on draft principles includes a statement on democracy and public participa- tion, as well as an affirmation of free markets and market mechanisms and principles. By contrast, the Ethics Com- mittee of the US Citizens’ Network in collaboration with the North American Coalition on Religion and Ecology states in its draft Universal Declaration of Interdependence for UNCED that ‘the principles of the free market should

It is now commonly understood that UNCED is not the final word on the global environmental crisis. It constitutes rather the beginning of a long and complex path to international environmental governance. In this context, the United Nations University (UNU) has initiated two new projects aimed at assisting decision makers and participants in international environmental negotiations.

GHG indices and international policy making

A central issue in the climate change convention relates to the amounts and sources of the greenhouse gases emitted from the various countries and regions, both industrialized and developing, and their relations to international gov- ernance. Many negotiators do not understand the key technical issues relating to emissions. Most delegations

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have no arguments that specify how much should be paid by whom to whom. To date, broad and absolute principles have stalled agreement on concrete and practical steps to meet the needs for stabilizing climate change.

The purpose of the present project is to fill that know- ledge gap and lay the basis for negotiations after UNCED. In this connection, the UNU has the unique opportunity of making a significant contribution to the negotiations by providing the negotiators and other concerned parties with the state-of-the-art of the process thus far.

The objectives of the project are to produce state-of- the-art reports on greenhouse indices, related internation- al policy making and governance, and the necessary North-South resource transfers.

The main output of the project will be a book tentatively entitled Global Greenhouse Regime: Who Pays?, drawing heavily on two earlier studies on greenhouse gas indices and North-South transfers, and on new commissioned state-of-the-art reports and case studies by leading special- ists in the field. The project will be implemented in collaboration with two institutions-the East-West Center and Nautilus Pacific Research, Inc. The scientific coordi- nators responsible for the editing of the book are: Dr Kirk Smith, Environment and Policy Institute, East-West Cen- ter, Honolulu, and Dr Peter Hayes, Nautilus Pacific Research, Inc, Melbourne.

Strengthening the position of developing countries in international negotiations

The developing countries have a central role in interna- tional fora negotiating measures against global environ- mental degradation. Their situation is rather complex, though, given the need to develop economically and the growing awareness of the negative environmental impact of accelerated industrial development. While the indus- trialized countries have the means and expertise to identify and implement countermeasures to environmental prob- lems, developing countries lack the freedom of choice and are at a disadvantage at the global environmental negotiat- ing tables. This UNU project, which will initially consist of producing a substantive book, is designed to evolve into a training activity which will assist professionals from de- veloping countries to upgrade their skills in involving their countries in the international environmental debate.

The project will be carried out in cooperation with the ‘Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales’ (CLAC- SO) and will have a particular focus on Latin America. The coordinator will be Dr Pablo Gutman.

Universities and sustainability ‘Creating a Common Future: University Action for Sustain- able Development’ was the theme of a conference jointly organized by the United Nations University, the Interna- tional Association of Universities, and the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada at Dalhousie Universi- ty, Halifax, Canada, 9-11 December 1991. At the conclu- sion of the meeting the following declaration was issued.

Human demands upon the planet are now of a volume and kind that, unless changed substantially, threaten the future well-being of all living species. Universities and their graduates must be significant actors if these demands are now to be shaped into the sustainable and equitable forms necessary for a wholesome future environment.

As the international community marshals its endeavours for a sustainable future, focused on the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Brazil in 1992, universities in all countries are increasingly examin- ing their own roles and responsibilities. At Talloires, France, in October 1990, a conference held under the auspices of Tufts University of the USA issued a declara- tion of environmental commitment that has attracted the support of more than 100 universities from many coun- tries. At Halifax, Canada, in December 1991, a gathering of university representatives addressed the challenge of environmentally sustainable development at the call of Dalhousie University.

The Dalhousie meeting added its voice to those many others worldwide that are deeply concerned about the continuing widespread degradation of Earth’s environ- ment, about the pervasive influence of poverty on the process, and about the unsustainable environmental prac- tices now so widespread. The meeting expressed the belief that solutions to these problems can be effective only to the extent that the mutual vulnerability of all societies, in the South and in the North, is recognized, and the energies and skills of people everywhere are employed in a posi- tive, cooperative fashion. Because the educational, re- search and public service roles of universities enable them to be competent, effective contributors to the major attitudinal and policy changes necessary for a sustainable future, the Dalhousie meeting invited the dedication of all universities to the following actions:

(1)To ensure that the voice of the university be clear and uncompromising in its commitment to the principle and practice of sustainable development within the uni- versity, and at the local, national and global levels.

(2)To utilize the intellectual resources of the university to encourage a better understanding on the part of society of the physical and biological dangers facing Earth.

(3)To emphasize the ethical obligation of the present generation to overcome those current malpractices of resource utilization and those widespread circum- stances of intolerable human disparity which lie at the root of environmental unsustainabihty.

(4)To establish whatever programmes are necessary with- in the university to generate the capability and the ca- pacity necessary to diminish environmental illiteracy and enhance ethical awareness of all graduating students.

(5)To cooperate with one another and with all segments of society in the pursuit of practical, effective revision and reversals of those current practices which contribute to environmental degradation, to South-North disparities and to intergenerational inequity.

(6)To employ all channels open to the university to communicate these understandings to UNCED, to governments and to the public at large.

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