Office of
Commua
Sustainable
•Development:
-Linkages and
Partnerships
for the
Developing World
-------
United States
Environmental Protection Agency
Carol M. Browner
Administrator
Communications, Education,
and Public Affairs
Loretta M. Ucelli
Associate Administrator
Miles Allen
Acting Director of Editorial Services
Karen Flagstad
Senior Editor
Teresa Opheim
Associate Editor
Ruth Barker
Photo Editor
Nancy Starnes
Assistant Editor
Marilyn Rogers
Circulation Manager
Francheska Greene
Intern
A Magazine on National and Global Environmental Perspectives
Design Credits
Ron Farrah
James R. Ingram
April-June 1993
Volume 19, Number 2
175-N-93-018
From the Editors
Although the negotiations were often contentious and the skeptics
were many, last year's United Nations Conference on Environ-
ment and Development laid a foundation for sound develop-
ment in the Third World. As Maurice Strong, secretary-general of the
conference, said recently, "We got agreement at the highest level pos-
sible on our planet to the most comprehensive and far-ranging action
program ever approved by the international community."
Crucial to that action program are closer linkages between spheres
that many have viewed as disparate in the past, such as environmental
protection and aid programs, and environmental protection and trade
policies. Also crucial are creative partnerships and more of them—
partnerships such as the United Nations' new Commission on Sustain-
able Development and an aid program called Africa 2000, which brings
together governments and grassroots organizations to fight against
poverty and to work to maintain ecosystems.
A previous issue of EPA journal examined domestic challenges facing
the United States in working toward Rio's directives. This issue focuses
on the developing world, reporting on tough questions that must be
answered as linkages are developed and partnerships are formed, and
on some concrete progress that has been made to help the developing
world work toward sustainable development.
Postscript: With Volume 19 (1993), EPA journal became a quarterly magazine.
In keeping with this change, the department previously called "Newsline"
has been renamed "EPA Roundup."
c/2
Q.
UU
Front cover: Village children in Liberia,
where nearly half the population is under
15 years of age and a quarter of the
children are malnourished. Will worldwide
sustainable development efforts help their
prospects tor the future?
Photo by Eric Poggenpohl for Folio Inc.
EPA JOURNAL Subscriptions
The annual rate for subscribers in the U.S. is $7.50. The annual rate for subscribers in foreign countries is $9.40. The price of a single copy of EPA Journal is $4.25 in the U.S. and $5.31 it
sont to a foreign amntry. Prices include mailing costs. Subscriptions to EPA journal as well as other federal government magazines are handled only by the U.S. Government Printing
Office. To subscribe to IIP A Journal, send a check or money order payable U> the Superintendent of Documents. The requests should be mailed to: P.O. Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA
15250-7954. To change address, call or write: The U.S. Government Printing Office, Public Documents Department, Superintendent of Documents, Washington, DC 20402; (202) 512-
2262.
f.PA journal is printed on recycled paper.
-------
CONTENTS
76-
N-
US EPA
q wrs and Chemical
West Bldg Room 3340
Mailcode 34D4T
C'L
1301 Constitution Aye NW
Washington DC 20004
202-566-0556
Sustainable Development:
Linkages and Partnerships for the Developing World
Worth Considering
2 Presidential Earth Day Address
Carol Browner on EPA's Priorities
4 Al Gore on Healing Our
Relationship with the Earth
page 2
The Developing World —^™«
8 Resource Rich and Poor
ID Beyond Mere Survival
by Shridath Ramphal
12 Products of the Earth Summit
14 What's in Agenda 21? page 37
15 Building the Capacity for Change
by Kathy Sessions
18 A Guide to International Organizations
20 Deforestation and the
Frontier Lands
by Carrie Meyer
22 The World Bank's Post-Rio Strategy
by Mohamed T. El-Ashry
26 Can the World Bank be Reformed?
by Korinna Horta
Zo Trade-Environment Tensions
by Paul Cough
30 Trade and the Rio Declaration
J1 Stopping the Waste
by William A. Nitze
34 Building Coalitions
by Linda Starke
36 In the U.S. Interest
by Gareth Porter
3o About Our Contributors
Departments _____
5 EPA Roundup
39 Habitat
A poem by W. Luckmann
4(J For the Classroom
42 On the Move
44 Chronicle
by Teresa Opheim
page 6
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is charged by Congress to protect the nation's land, air, and water systems. Under a mandate of national
environmental laws, the Agency strives to formulate and implement actions which lead to a compatible balance between human activities and the
ability of natural systems to support and nurture life.
F.PA Journal is published by EPA. The Administrator of EPA has determined that the publication of this periodical is necessary in the transaction of
the public business required by law of this Agency. Use of funds for printing this periodical has been approved by the Director of the Office of
Management and Budget. Views expressed by authors do not necessarily reflect EPA policy. No permission necessary to reproduce contents except
copyrighted photos and other materials.
Contributions and inquiries are welcome and should be addressed to: Editor, EPA Journal (A-107), Waterside Mall, 401 M Street, SW, Washington,
DC 20460.
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Presidential Earth Day
Address
President Clinton announces
environmental actions
On April 21, 1993, President Kill Clinton
spoke 11! the U.S. Botanical Gardens in
Washington, DC, to celebrate V.arth Dai/.
I lere arc excerpts from his address, irliich
outlined principles and policy directions for
reclaiming a clean environment:
f there is one commitment that
defines our people, it is our
devotion to the rich and expan-
sive land we have inherited. From the
first Americans to the present day, our
people have lived in awe of the power,
the majesty, and the beauty of the
forest, the rivers, and the streams of
America. That love of the land, which
flows like a mighty current through this
land and through our character, burst
into service on the first Farth Day in
1970....
"Just as we yearn to come together
as ,1 people, we yearn to move beyond
the false choices that the last few years
have imposed upon us. For too long,
we have been told that we have to
choose between the economy and the
environment; between our jobs;
between our obligations to our own
people and our responsibilities to the
future and to the rest of the world;
between public action and private
economy.
"1 am here today in the hope that we
can together take a different course of
action, to offer a new set of challenges
to our people. Our environmental
program is based on three principles.
First, we think you can't have a healthy
economy without a healthy environ-
ment. We need not choose between
breathing clean air and bringing home
secure paychecks. The fact is that our
environmental problems result not
from robust growth, but from reckless
growth. The fact is that only a prosper-
ous society can have the confidence and
the means to protect its environment.
And the fact is healthy communities
and environmentally sound products
and services do best in today's eco-
nomic competition.
"Thai's why our policies must
protect our environment, promote
economic growth, and provide millions
of new high-skill, high-wage jobs.
"Second, we want to protect the
environment at home and abroad. In an
era of global economics, global epidem-
ics, and global environmental hazards,
a central challenge of our time is to
promote our national interest in the
context of its connectedness with the
rest of the world. We share our atmo-
sphere, our planet, our destiny with all
the peoples of this world. And the
policies I outline today will protect all
of us because that is the only way we
can protect any of us.
"And, third, we must move beyond
the antagonisms among business,
government, and individual citizens.
The policies 1 outline today are part of
our effort to reinvent government, to
make it your partner and not your
overseer, to lead by example and not by
bureaucratic fiat....
"Our long-term strategy invests
more in pollution prevention, energy
efficiency, and solar energy; in renew-
able energy, environmental restoration,
and water treatment—all of which can
be found in the five-year budget that
we have presented to the Congress.
These investments will create tens of
thousands of new jobs, and they will
save tens of thousands more. Because
when we save energy and resources,
we will have more to invest in creating
new jobs and providing better living
EPA JOURNAL
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standards....
"I've asked the Energy Department,
the Commerce Department, and EPA to
assess current environmental technolo-
gies and create a strategic plan to give
our companies the trade development,
promotional efforts, and technical
assistance they need to turn these
advances into jobs here in America, as
well as to help promote a better
environment. America can maintain
our lead in the world economy by
taking the lead to preserve the world
environment.
"Last year, the nations of the world
came together at the Earth Summit in
Rio to try to find a way to protect the
miraculous diversity of plant and
animal life all across the planet. The
Biodiversity Treaty which resulted had
some flaws, and we all knew that. But
instead of fixing them, the United States
walked away from the treaty. That left
us out of a treaty that is critically
important not only to our future, but to
the future of the world. And not only
because of what it will do to preserve
species, but because of opportunities it
offers for cutting-edge companies
whose research creates new medicines,
new products, and new jobs ....
"Our administration has worked
with business and environmental
groups toward an agreement that
protects both American interests and
the world environment. Today, I am
proud to announce the United States'
intention to sign the Biodiversity
Treaty.
'This is an example of what you can
do by bringing business and environ-
mentalists together, instead of pitting
them against each other. We can move
forward to protect critical natural
resources and critical technologies. I'm
also directing the State Department to
move ahead with our talks with other
countries which have signed the
convention so that the United States
can move as quickly as possible toward
ratification.
"To learn more about where we
stand in protecting all our biological
resources here at home, I'm asking the
Interior Department to create a national
biological survey to help us protect
endangered species and, just as impor-
tantly, to help the agricultural and
biotechnical industries of our country
identify new sources of food, fiber, and
medication.
"We also must take the lead in
addressing the challenge of global
warming that could make our planet
and its climate more hostile to human
life. Today, I announce our nation's
commitment to reducing our emis-
sions of greenhouse gases to their 1990
levels by the year 2000 ....
"I am proud that yesterday the U.S.
Army announced its plan to clean up a
large number of sites where we
learned recently that chemical weap-
ons materials may be buried ....
Working with EPA, the Army will
clean up this problem safely and in an
environmentally sound manner....
Now, we are taking steps to defend
our people and our environment and
the environment of the world. In that
same spirit, I plan to sign an executive
order requiring federal facilities that
manufacture, process, or use toxic
chemicals to comply with the federal
right-to-know laws, and publicly
report what they are doing ....
"It is time that the U. S. government
begins to live under the laws it makes
for other people. With this executive
order, I ask all federal facilities to set a
voluntary goal to reduce their release
of toxic pollutants by 50 percent by
1999. This will reduce toxic releases,
control costs associated with cleanups,
and promote clean technologies. And
it will help make our government
what it should be—a positive example
for the rest of the country.
"Poor neighborhoods in our cities
suffer most often from toxic pollution.
Cleaning up the toxic wastes will
create new jobs in those neighbor-
hoods and make them safer places to
live, to work, and to do business.
"Today, I am also signing an
executive order that directs federal
agencies to make preliminary changes
in their purchasing policies, to use
fewer substances harmful to the ozone
layer. Here, too, we must put our
actions where our values are. Our
government is a leading purchaser of
goods and services. And it's time to
stop not only the waste of taxpayers'
money but the waste of our natural
resources.
'Today, I am signing an executive
order which commits the federal
government to buy thousands more
American-made vehicles, using clean,
domestic fuels such as natural gas,
ethanol, methanol, and electric power.
This will reduce our demand for
foreign oil, reduce air pollution,
promote promising technologies,
promote American companies, create
American jobs, and save American tax
dollars....
"In that same spirit, I plan to sign an
executive order committing every
agency of the national government to
do more than ever to buy and use
recycled products. This will provide a
market for new technologies, make
better use of recycled materials, and
encourage the creation of new products
that can be offered to the government,
to private companies, and to consum-
ers. And again, it will create jobs
through the recycling process.
"We must keep finding new ways to
be a force for positive change. For
example, the federal government is the
largest purchaser of computer equip-
ment in the world, and computers are
the fastest-growing area of electricity
use. That's why I am also signing an
executive order today requiring the
federal government to purchase
energy-efficient computers. We're
going to expand the market for a
technology which America pioneered
and still leads the world, and we'll save
energy, save the taxpayers $40 million a
year, and set an example for our
country and for the world ....
"On a colder day in the middle of
winter, just three months ago, a poet
asked us to celebrate not only the
marvelous diversity of our people, but
the miraculous bounty of our land.
'Here on the pulse of this new day,'
Maya Angelou challenged us to look at
'the rock, the river, the tree, your
country.' Now, it is a season of new
hope and new beginnings. And as we
look anew at our neighbors, our
children, and our own communities, as
well as the world around us, we must
seize the possibilities inherent in this
exhilarating moment; to face our
challenges, to exercise our responsibili-
ties, and to rejoice in them." •
APRIL-JUNE 1993
-------
Carol Browner on
EPA's Priorities
On Tuesday, April U, 1993, EPA Adminis-
trator Carol Browner held an All-Hands
nuvting for F.PA employees at Waterside
Mall. Vice-President Al Gore spoke at the
meeting, as did Administrator Browner.
Following are excerpts from their remarks.
"I
n the election last November,
the American people were given
a choice: the status quo or
change. And they selected change. The
only way that we will deliver that
change is by working together, by
tearing down the barriers that exist
between programs and across media
and between headquarters and the
regions; by tearing down the barriers
that exist between states and EPA,
between local governments and EPA.
"I have four priorities for the Agency.
First, pollution prevention. Everybody
talks about pollution prevention, and we
have a pollution prevention office that
does great work. We have got to move to
the next generation: to integrate pollu-
tion prevention into every single thing
that we do .... We must look for opportu-
nities in permits, in rulemaking, and in
enforcement, to bring pollution preven-
tion ideas into every single thing that we
do. Pollution prevention is our best hope
for the future of environmental protec-
tion; not fust environmental regulation,
but environmental protection.
"A second priority: Why do we do the
work that we do? To protect ecosystems.
Unfortunately, however, the laws that
we are responsible for implementing are
media-specific. The challenge for us is to
reach across those media-specific
programs, to bring them together in a
coordinated ecosystem protection
manner. If we fail at that, those across the
country who are arguing that environ-
mental regulation is too costly will
prevail, and we will lose ground in the
work that we have done ....
'The third priority is building
partnerships. There is a tremendous
wealth of resources outside of this
Agency to help us do the job that we
want to do. We must build those
partnerships with state and local
government, nonprofit organizations, the
business community. It is in numbers
that we will find strength, unlike the
strength we can never have alone ....
'The final area of importance to me
and this Administration is to incorporate
equity into our mission and programs.
We must make sure that our programs
are fair and protective for all, and we
must do a better job of ensuring that the
EPA work force is representative of this
country.
"1 look forward to helping all of you
in the work that you do to make sure that
we integrate these missions and this
vision. In four years we want to look
back and point to things all across this
country where the public is
protected and the environment has
been restored." •
Al Gore on Healing Our Relationship with the Earth
"We are living in a time when the
relationship between human civiliza-
tion and the ecological system of the
Earth is undergoing dramatic, radical
change. Three factors have combined
to produce this radical change:
population growth, which is now
adding the equivalent of one China's
worth of people every 10 years; new
technologies, which vastly magnify
the impact that human beings have on
the Earth, bringing us great blessings
but also often bringing us adverse
consequences that we did not antici-
pate and are not really prepared to
deal with; and third—most important
of all—a way of thinking about our
relationship to the Earth which has
convinced all too many that we simply
do not have to take responsibility for
what we do; that we can act with
impunity.
These three factors together have
combined to cause a new destructive
relationship which absolutely must be
healed in our generation and in our
lifetimes. Unless we heal this relation-
ship now, we run the risk of crossing a
point of no return, beyond which the
ability to repair the damage will be
much diminished.
"I am filled with hope because I see
tremendous signs of progress and
change. But all of us know very well
that the only way that change will
come is if the United States of America
leads the way.... This is a turning
point. These next several years are
years that President Clinton, Carol
Browner, and I want to be the most
exciting years of your lives. We want
you to be a part of a team that changes
the way that we protect and preserve
the environment and changes the way
we as Americans think about and
fulfill our obligations of stewardship."
EPA JOURNAL
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EPA ROUNDUPi
Secondhand Smoke Designated a Known Human Carcinogen
In its final assessment of the
respiratory health effects of
passive smoking, EPA has
concluded that environmental
tobacco smoke (ETS), also
known as secondhand smoke,
is a human lung carcinogen,
responsible for approximately
3,000 lung cancer deaths
annually among U.S. non-
smokers. The Agency has also
concluded that passive
smoking results in serious
respiratory problems for
infants and young children.
EPA's Science Advisory Board
(SAB) has fully endorsed the
risk assessment, including the
conclusion that ETS should be
classified a "Group A"
carcinogen, EPA's category of
greatest scientific certainty for
known or suspected carcino-
gens. The SAB is the
Agency's independent panel
of outside scientific advisors
that routinely reviews draft
reports.
According to The Wash-
ington Post: " ... Health
advocates praised the report,
saying that it was certain to
lead to greater restrictions on
smoking in public places. The
tobacco industry said that
scientific evidence does not
support the EPA's conclusions
.... Among the report's
findings:
• Secondhand cigarette
smoke is a human carcino-
gen, killing about 3,000 U.S.
nonsmokers because of lung
cancer annually.
• Cigarette smoke is respon-
sible for 150,000 to 300,000
cases of bronchitis and
pneumonia and other lower
respiratory infections in
children up to 18 months of
age.
• Cigarette smoke increases
frequency and severity of
symptoms in 200,000 to 1
million children with asthma
and increases the risk of new
cases of asthma.
• Tobacco smoke also causes
build up of fluid in the middle
ear, a condition that can lead
to ear infections .... "
The Los Angeles Times
commented: " ... By formally
declaring that secondary
smoke is a potent carcinogen
in a class with radon, asbestos
and other established cancer-
causing agents, the report is
likely to provide impetus for
efforts to further restrict
smoking in the workplace and
elsewhere—renewing the
debate over the rights of
smokers versus those of
nonsmokers .... The most
bitter resistance to the EPA's
move to link secondary smoke
and lung cancer has been
waged by Philip Morris USA,
a leading cigarette manufac-
turer, and by the Tobacco
Institute, the industry's chief
lobbying organization. Some
30 years after the landmark
surgeon general's report on
smoking and health, the
industry continues to argue
that there is no scientific proof
of a link between cancer and
smoking. Health groups—
among them the American
Heart Assn., the American
Cancer Society and the
American Lung Assn.—said
that they are hopeful the EPA
report will spur government
action to curtail smoking in
public places .... Although the
EPA has the authority to
classify secondary smoke as a
carcinogen, it cannot itself
impose restrictions that would
protect nonsmokers. That role
could fall to the Occupational
Health and Safety Administra-
tion. Action on Smoking and
Health, which for more than
two decades has carried on
anti-smoking crusades, has
sued OSHA in an attempt to
force sharp restrictions or
bans on smoking in the work
place ...."
The Wall Street Journal
said: " ... As a result of the
EPA's report linking 'passive'
tobacco smoke to lung cancer
and other ailments, a new
wave of tobacco-related
lawsuits is likely, legal
specialists say. These are
expected to include:
• Workers' compensation
claims by nonsmokers who
say they became ill in a
smoke-filled workplace.
• Suits against tobacco
companies by nonsmokers
who have been exposed,
anywhere, to cigarette smoke.
• Damage suits by customers
who experience adverse
reactions, such as respiratory
problems, at restaurants, bars
and other facilities that permit
smoking.
While all these lawsuits
have been attempted before,
usually unsuccessfully, the
KPA n-port is expected to be
cited as compelling evidence
of the perils of passive smoke.
And it could aid plaintiffs
even in cases in which
exposure to the smoke
preceded by many years the
issuance of the report. As in
all such cases, though, the
plaintiff will still have to
prove that the presence of the
smoke caused his or her
illness .... In part because of
the political complexity of
pushing through regulations
or legislation on such contro-
versial matters, the govern-
ment has often encouraged
private lawyers to bring
lawsuits that might help bring
about the same results as
legislation. In the past, civil
rights and the environment
have been among the areas in
which lawyers in the private
sector, sometimes viewed as
'private attorneys general/
have promoted a public policy
through litigation ...."
APRIL-JUNE 1993
-------
EPA ROUNDUPl
ENFORCEMENT
Stores Penalized
for Selling
Ozone Depleters
EPA's Boston office has
proposed $161,000 in penalties
against 10 retail stores in
Massachusetts and one each in
New Hampshire and Rhode
Island for selling auto air
conditioning refrigerants
containing ozone depleters to
the general public. Under the
Clean Air Act, small containers
(less than 20 pounds) of such
refrigerants may be sold only
to technicians certified to
operate refrigerant recycling
equipment. The violations
occurred during a series of
unannounced calls on auto
parts and hardware stores in
which EPA inspectors posed as
customers. The penalties range
from $7,000 to $30,000,
depending on the number of
violations, the size of the store,
and the amount of refrigerant
sold. The stores have 30 days
to request a hearing with the
Agency. These are the first
enforcement actions taken by
EPA under the Clean Air Act
requirement, which went into
effect last November. Anyone
knowing of the illegal sale of
ozone depleting refrigerants is
urged to call EPA's Strato-
spheric Ozone Protection
hotline at 800-296-1996.
Texaco, U.S. Oil to
Pay $14.7 Million for
Oil Spills
Under consent decrees
proposed to the U.S. District
Court in Seattle, Texaco
Refining and Marketing Inc.,
and U.S. Oil & Refining Co.,
will pay a total of $14.7
million in penalties and
clean-up costs for two
separate oil spills in Wash-
ington state. The actions,
announced by EPA, the
Department of Justice, and
the U.S. Coast Guard, were
the first to be brought under
the Oil Pollution Act of 1990,
enacted following the Exxon
Valdez spill.
Texaco spilled approxi-
mately 5,000 barrels of oil
near Fidalgo Bay when a
pump exploded at its
refinery near Anacortes. The
company will pay about $8
million to complete cleanup
of the spill, will install spill
prevention equipment at a
cost of about $800,000, pay
the government's removal
costs of $125,000, and pay a
civil penalty of $480,000 to
the United States in addition
to a $20,000 penalty already
paid to Washington state.
U.S. Oil spilled more than
14,000 barrels of oil at
Tacoma when an under-
ground pipe burst during
unloading of a tanker. Some
of the oil entered Com-
mencement Bay, a part of
Puget Sound. The company
will pay about $4 million to
complete cleanup, will
install spill prevention
equipment at a cost of about
$800,000, pay the
government's removal costs
of almost $60,000, and pay a
civil penalty of $425,000 to
the United States in addition
to a $45,000 penalty paid to
Washington state.
Standards to Be Strengthened for Disposal of Radioactive Wastes
EPA has proposed more
rigorous standards for
protecting public health
and the environment from
the management, storage,
and disposal of spent
nuclear fuel, high-level, and
transurank radioactive
wastes. Specifically, waste
disposal systems would
have to limit exposure of
individuals to no more than
15 millirems per year—
roughly equivalent to two X-
rays. Also, releases of radioac-
tive material could not cause
ground water to exceed
standards set under the Safe
Drinking Water Act. The new
standards would amend those
established in 1985 under the
Atomic Energy Act; EPA will
develop criteria for certifying
compliance with them.
Radioactive wastes result
from government and com-
mercial uses of nuclear fuel.
Sources of spent nuclear fuel
include nuclear power plants
and nuclear defense produc-
tion reactors. High-level waste
is created when spent fuel is
processed to recover uranium
and plutonium that is used in
weapon programs. Most
transuranic wastes consist of
rags, equipment, tools, and
sludges that have become
contaminated in the produc-
tion of nuclear weapons.
The standards and criteria
will apply to the Department
of Energy (DOE) Waste
Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP)
near Carlsbad, New Mexico,
a deep geologic repository
for defense transuranic
wastes. Before disposing of
wastes at the WIPP site, DOE
must demonstrate that
operations there will comply
with the EPA standards.
EPA JOURNAL
-------
EPA "Energy Star" Expands to Computer Printers
In a major expansion of EPA's
Energy Star program, which
awards Energy Star logos to
energy-conserving personal
computers, (see July/August
1992 EPA journal), companies
accounting for 80 percent of
the laser printers sold in the
United States have committed
to introducing printers that
can automatically reduce
power consumption when
inactive. Studies show that
computer equipment is
inactive the vast majority of
time it is turned on. EPA
estimates that Energy Star
printers will save 6 billion
kilowatt-hours of electricity
each year, reducing air
pollution from power plants
and saving consumers $450
million in electric bills.
Administrator Carol Browner
said: "Today's announce-
ment reflects President
Clinton's vision of reinventing
government to encourage
pollution prevention and
voluntary corporate environ-
mentalism. The companies
joining the Energy Star printer
program should be applauded
for being at the forefront of a
worldwide movement toward
creating consumer products
that incorporate environmental
protection and energy-saving
criteria."
The New York Times com-
mented: " ... The secret to
energy conservation, according
to the Environmental Protec-
tion Agency, is not always
doing more with less. Some-
times it means doing nothing
with less. Specifically, the
agency wants electronic
equipment to draw less
electricity while it is switched
on but waiting for something
to do. So last week, the agency
announced that seven leading
makers of computer printers,
representing 80 percent of the
laser-printer market, had
agreed to redesign their
machines to use less power
when they are on standby. For
many printers, that's nearly all
day long .... Manufacturers that
meet the standards will get an
'Energy Star' seal to put on the
box. A similar program was
announced for computers last
year .... At Lexmark Interna-
tional, the company that
produces printers for I.B.M.,
Virgil Boler, a product assur-
ance manager, said the
company's laser printers
typically drew about 300 watts
when they were running and
68 watts when they were doing
nothing. Much of the 68 watts
powers a bulb for heating the
drum that is used to fuse the
ink to the page; some of the
electricity also runs a fan to
carry off excess heat. The
redesigned model will draw
only 18 to 19 watts, he said.
But it may take 30 seconds
to warm up after a long idle
period, compared with
about 10 seconds for the
current models. At Bull
H.N. Italia, which makes
printers under the
Compuprint brand, Ralph
Levey, a manager, said the
main 'bells and whistles'
that sell computers are
factors like the number of
dots in an inch and how
many kinds of type the
printer can produce. But
eventually customers will
seek out machines that use
less power, he said. 'It may
very well be that you'll see
bids from the Government
that the printers must meet
E.P.A. guidelines,' he said.
'It's an idea that has long
been appropriate ....'"
On Board Computers to Watch Over Auto Emission Controls
Under a final rule issued by EPA,
on board diagnostic computers
will be installed on passenger cars
and light trucks to monitor the
operation of emission control
systems commencing with the
1994 model year. Information on
malfunctions will be stored in a
memory bank, which can then be
accessed by technicians.
According to the Agency, many
problems with emission control
systems do not affect a car's
performance, and drivers are not
aware of them. Also, the com-
plexities of modern day controls
often require examination of the
entire system to discoivr a
problem. The on board computer
will not only identify the problem
but will alert the driver with a
dashboard light. Repairs of
malfunctions discovered early on
are usually less complicated and
can fn'fjuently be accomplished
under manufacturer's warranty.
On issuing the rule, Adminis-
trator Carol Browner commented:
"Proper vehicle maintenance
prolongs the life of vehicles,
improves fuel economy, and
ensures return on the $50 billion
that motorists have invested in
auto pollution controls. 1 also
expect this new program to benefit
many of the areas currently
exceeding federal ozone and
carbon monoxide air quality
standards."
The Wall Street Journal
reported: "... The Environ-
mental Protection Agency
ordered that new passenger
cars and light trucks include
diagnostic computer systems
that check for malfunctions in
emission-control components
.... The diagnostic-systems
regulation applies to new cars
and light trucks starting with
the 1994 model year. Under
the regulation, which stems
from the 1990 Clean Air Act,
auto makers will have to install
devices that check emission-
control systems at least once
each time a vehicle is driven. If
a system is functioning
improperly, a dashboard light
will alert drivers to the
problem. The systems also will
record where problems, which
often are difficult to find, are
occurring. California already
requires similar diagnostic
systems for vehicles sold in
that state. According to the
EPA, the new systems required
by the federal government will
add about $65 to the cost of
each new car or light truck, an
expense that largely will be
offset by fuel savings and
reduced repair
costs .... "
APRIL-JUNE 1993
-------
Resource Rich and Poor
The world's inequitable distribution of wealth and consumption
UNSTED STATES
United States
Per capita Gross National Product $21.039
Energy use per capita (millions BTUs) 309
Access to safe water (rural population) NA
Infant mortality (per 1000) 10
Population under 15years 21.2%
Calorie intake per day 3,200 -f
Per capita Gross National Product $2,952
Energy use per capita (millions BTUs) 47
Access to safe water (rural population) 86%
Infant mortality (per 1000) 63
Population under 15 years 33.7%
Calorie intake per day 2,400-2,799
ATLANTIC OCEAN
PACIFIC OCEAN
Zimbabwe
Per capita Gross National Product
Energy use per capita (millions BTUs!
Access to safe water (rural population
Infant mortality (per 1000)
Population under 15 years
Calorie intake per day
-------
Romania
Per capita Gross National Product
Energy use per capita (millions BTUs)
Access to safe water (rural population)
Infant mortality (per 1000)
Population under 15 years
Calorie intake per day
$2,312
132
90%
22
21,8%
3,200 +
China
Per capita Gross National Product $374
Energy use per capita (millions BTUs) 24
Access to safe water (rural population) 66%
Infant mortality (per 1000) 32
Population under 15 years 26.3 %
Calorie intake per day
Per capita Gross National Product
Energy use per capita (millions BTUs)
Access to safe water (rural population) 11 %
Infant mortality (per 1000) 137
Population under 15 years 46.2 %
Calorie intake per day under 2,
Per capita Gross National Product
Energy use per capita (millions BTUs)
Access to safe water (rural population)
Infant mortality (per 1000)
Population under 15 years
$181
4
89%
119
42.1 %
Calorie intake per day
under 2,000
INDIAN OCEAN
Sources: The 1993 Information Please Environmental Almanac, Atlas of the Environment
-------
Beyond Mere Survival
Hope lies in equitable partnerships
between rich and poor countries
by Shridath Ramphal
his issue of the EPA Journal is
devoted to sustairiability and the
developing world. It follows an
earlier issue on working toward
sustainabiliry in the United States. The
conjunction is significant, underlining as
it does that "sustainable development"
applies to all countries.
Nothing illustrates better how
sustairiability challenges us all than the
link between population and poverty.
Growth rates have been declining, but by
2050 the planet could have double the
number of humans it has now. While as
much as 90 percent of this growth will be
in developing countries, the impact of
their increase on the environment (if
present consumption patterns persist)
will be lower than that exerted by the 10
percent added in the developed coun-
tries. Nevertheless, there is no avoiding
the reality that burgeoning populations
in poor countries will strain their natural
resources beyond tolerable limits.
For a family on the edge of survival, it
makes sense to have several children in
the hope that some will survive to
(Sir Shridath Ramphal of Guyana, Secre-
tary-General of the Commonwealth 1975-
90, is President of the World Conservation
Union (lUCN)and Co-Chairman of the
Commission on Global Governance. He
was a member of the Brundtland Commis-
sion and a Special Adviser to the Secretary-
General of the Earth Summit, for which he
wrote Our Country, The Planet (Wash-
ington: Island Press).
support the rest. But when many
families act the same way, the result is
far more people than resources can
sustain. Where there is already too little
food, water, health care, sanitation,
housing, jobs, energy, and land, rapid
population growth makes development
Poverty... restrains
the demographic
transition to smaller
families.
difficult. In Kenya, for example, which
suffers acutely from land hunger, urban
unemployment, and environmental
stress, a woman now produces nearly
seven children on average. The popula-
tion could quadruple to nearly 100
million in 35 years if the present rate of
growth continues. In Bangladesh, where
almost every acre of cultivable land is
already used, and millions live on flood-
prone rnudbanks, facing imminent
disaster, the population is expected to
double from 110 million to 220 million
over the same period, even assuming a
halving of the birth rate. Increases in
population pressure of this order
contribute to many of the world's most
acute environmental problems, including
deforestation and desertification. They
widen and deepen poverty, which in
turn keeps birth rates high. Poverty, in a
perverse but historically predictable
way, restrains the demographic transi-
tion to smaller families.
A fundamental response to the
challenge of the population crisis is,
therefore, inseparable from a response to
the need for development itself. Ecology
and economy are twin elements of global
sustainability. Trade illustrates this well.
Developing countries know that trade
can be the engine that powers their climb
out of poverty. They have taken the
advice coming from industrial countries
and from bodies like the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank; to a
far greater extent than before, they are
turning to the global marketplace, just as
they are embracing market forces at
home. But they face an array of restric-
tions that prevent them from competing
freely and benefiting fully from their
comparative advantage in producing
many types of exports. Even very poor
countries like Bangladesh (annual
income $180 per head in 1989) and very
small ones like Mauritius (population
200,000) have found that the world
market bristles with obstacles placed by
much richer countries.
Industrial countries, for example,
often follow a policy that favors imports
with the least value added. Processed
and manufactured products are discour-
aged through rates of import duty that
are higher than those imposed on the
raw material. Sawn timber, for example,
faces a higher duty than raw logs,
generally admitted at zero duty; furni-
10
EPA JOURNAL
-------
ture carries an even higher tariff than
timber. The environmental conse-
quences are inevitable.
This policy is applied to many
products poor countries need to export:
cotton, jute, leather, rubber, paper, iron,
tobacco. Fruit and vegetables also
confront escalating tariffs: Prepared
products have to pay twice the duty
charged on fresh produce. Because
industrial nations adopt this approach,
exporting countries have to sell more of
the raw product to earn the same
income. They can do so only by putting
more pressure on their land and other
natural resources.
Policies that offer developing coun-
tries better access to markets will be
better for both world trade and planetary
health. The trade barriers rich countries
impose cost poor countries billions of
dollars in lost export earnings. These
losses exceed by far what industrial
nations give as development aid,
amounting to $54 billion in 1990. The
World Bank reckons that, on clothing
and textiles alone, developing countries
are losing as much as $24 billion a year,
owing to protectionist curbs in rich
countries. These barriers have been
increasing. The United Nations says that
20 out of 24 industrial countries are more
protectionist now than they were 10
years ago. It is because they block free
trade in this way that rich countries have
an added obligation to support the Third
World through aid.
Unfortunately, at the Earth Summit,
the U.N. Conference on Environment
and Development (UNCED) held last
June in Brazil, there was no firm commit-
ment of so-called "new and additional
resources" from rich countries for
implementation of Agenda 21. The
decision to provide the funds needed
was deferred—at best, for consideration
by the rich among themselves; at worst,
ad infinitum. Agenda 21 was agreed to,
but in effect made subject to the rich
countries' providing resources to
supplement and energize the much
greater resources to be provided by the
poor themselves.
What are the prospects for
sustainability when over the last decade
more than half of all U.S. aid went to
only two countries (Israel and Egypt);
when the United States, which once
provided 60 percent of the world's aid,
now gives only about 16 percent; when
more than two dozen nations now
exceed the United States in the percent-
age of gross national product they devote
to foreign aid, with Japan now surpass-
ing the United States in absolute terms as
well?
However, it is not the withholding of
aid alone that retards sustainability in the
developing world; it is the withholding
of technology, as well. Developing
countries must, of course, make their
development as environmentally benign
as possible. This obligation they share
with industrially advanced nations.
They now know much more about the
sources of ecological damage and of the
processes and practices they should try
to avoid. But this knowledge does not
guarantee that they can use alternative
processes.
Green technologies—recycling
techniques, alternative energy sources,
thriftier engines, CFC-free coolants—are
developed mainly in industrial countries,
which have some 95 percent of the
world's facilities and scientists for
research and development. For the
global movement to sustainable develop-
ment to gain momentum, poor nations
must be helped to employ these tech-
nologies as they industrialize and as they
modernize their farming. This requires
international arrangements for the
A study in contrasts: A poor Rio shantytown uphill from Ipanema Beach, world famous for attracting upscale tourists.
APRIL-JUNE 1993
11
-------
transfer of technology to developing
nations on terms suited to their circum-
stances.
More is required than awareness. The
dual responsibilities of rich and poor
countries are not wholly separate and
self-contained. It is not simply a matter
of each group of countries pursuing its
own path to sustainable development
and the paths converging in a secure
environment. The logo of UNCED
depicts the Earth "In Our Hands." It
asserts that sustainable development
requires a shared effort by all the world's
people, a partnership for survival in
which each country has a role that is
related to, sometimes integrated into, the
roles of others.
Other implications follow. The
partnership is not between equals.
Developed and developing countries are
unequal in responsibility for getting it
wrong and in capacity for setting it right.
Aristotle, in his Ethics, has instructed us
that equity between unequals requires
not "reciprocity" but "proportionality."
His dictum holds in this ultimate domain
of environmental restoration. Propor-
tionality must be the ethical touchstone
of the roles of developed and developing
countries in their partnership for
survival through sustainable develop-
ment.
Practicality dictates no differently. If
climate change, with its serious implica-
tions for all, is essentially the result of
greenhouse gas emissions, and those
emissions are overwhelmingly from
developed countries, there is no avoiding
the conclusion that the primary require-
ment is a reduction in emissions from
those developed countries. There are
roles for developing countries, like not
adding to the problem by burning
rainforests, but the central requirement is
a change in course by developed coun-
tries. The same is true for many other
elements of global environmental
degradation: ozone layer depletion, acid
rain, over-fishing, hazardous waste,
nuclear risks. "The polluter pays" is a
principle with application beyond
national frontiers—and beyond financial
recompense.
Products of the Earth Summit
The nearly 180 governments partici-
pating in the U.N. Conference on
Environment and Development
(UNCED) adopted three new
agreements by consensus:
• The Rio Declaration on Environment
and Development sets out 27 prin-
ciples to guide the behavior of
nations toward more environmen-
tally sustainable patterns of develop-
ment. The declaration, a delicate
compromise between developing
and industrialized countries which
was tortuously crafted at prepara-
tory meetings, was adopted in Rio
without negotiation due to fears that
further debate would jeopardize any
agreement. UNCED Secretary
General Maurice Strong and U.N.
Secretary General Boutros Boutros-
Ghali each praised the declaration as
an important achievement, but
called on states to negotiate a more
inspirational and legally progressive
"Earth Charter" for adoption in 1995
on the 50th anniversary of the
United Nations.
• States at UNCED also adopted a
voluntary action plan called Agenda
21, so named because it is intended
to provide an agenda for local,
national, regional, and global action
into the 21st century. UNCED
Secretary General Maurice Strong
called Agenda 21 "the most comprehen-
sive, the most far-reaching and, if
implemented, the most effective
program of international action ever
sanctioned by the international commu-
nity." Agenda 21 comprises hundreds
of pages of recommended actions to
address environmental problems and
promote sustainable development. It
also represents an experimental process
of building consensus on a "global
workplan" for the economic, social, and
environmental tasks of the United
Nations as they evolve over time.
• The third official product of UNCED
was a "non-legally binding authoritative
statement of principles for a global consen-
sus on the management, conservation, and
sustainable development of all types of
forests." Negotiations on the forest
statement, begun as negotiations for a
legally binding convention on forests,
were among the most difficult of the
UNCED process. Many states and
experts, dissatisfied with the end result,
emerged from UNCED seeking further
negotiations toward agreement on a
framework convention on forests.
Two international conventions were
presented and opened for signature at
UNCED, each of which attracted
signatures of representatives of more
than 150 countries:
• A Framework Convention on Climate
Change requires signatories to take
steps to reduce their emissions of
gases believed to contribute to global
warming, although no mandatory
targets and timetables for such
actions were set, largely at the
insistence of U.S. negotiators. In Rio,
then-President George Bush signed
the climate change convention. On
April 21,1993, President Clinton
pledged that the United States would
reduce its emissions of greenhouse
gases to their 1990 levels by the year
2000 and would take the lead in
addressing global warming.
• A Framework Convention on Biologi-
cal Diversity prescribes steps for the
protection and sustainable use of the
world's diverse plant and animal
species. Then-President Bush refused
to sign the biodiversity convention,
citing concerns about protection of
intellectual property rights and the
treaty's financing arrangements. On
April 21, President Clinton reported
that the Administration had worked
out an interpretive statement ad-
dressing some business and environ-
mental groups' concerns, and he
announced that the United States
would sign the biodiversity conven-
tion.
—Kathy Sessions
12
EPA JOURNAL
-------
In crowded Calcutta, rush hour mingles old and new modes of transportation.
What if the developed world refuses
to take the path of sustainable develop-
ment, including helping the developing
world to do so? The most extreme
consequence would be environmental
catastrophe, with severe implications for
human life on the planet. To a degree
unique in human history, a quarter of
humanity has the potential not just for
self-destruction, but for the extinction of
the human species.
Developing countries cannot resign
themselves to that scenario, yet they
know they are not empowered to
frustrate it. They can find hope in the
fact that as three-quarters of the world's
people they are not wholly without
negotiating strength, that with many in
the developed world sharing their
insistence on survival they will never
be entirely by themselves, that in the
final analysis our human instinct to
preserve life will transcend our capac-
ity to destroy it. But not even taken
together do these factors for hope
provide total assurance.
Meanwhile, the industrial world
continues to consume 75 percent of the
world's commercial energy, 90 percent
of its traded hardwood, 81 percent of
its paper, 80 percent of its iron and
steel, 70 percent of its milk and meat,
60 percent of its fertilizers—to mention
only some of the distortions in con-
sumption—leaving less than a quarter
of the global resource pie for the other
three-quarters of the world's people.
Developing countries ask whether
global sustainability can really be
achieved under such skewed appor-
tionments of wealth and poverty. They
ask whether a compact isn't needed
under which they restrain their
proclivity for short-term progress in
exchange for assurance of a new global
setting that offers space for their long-
term development. They have not had
an answer; what they infer from the
body language of the rich countries is
not reassuring.
Poverty traps the developing world in
a vicious circle of constraint against
sustainability. Chronic poverty works
against civil society, against good
governance and the realisation of human
rights broadly understood in their
economic, social, and cultural dimen-
sions, no less than the civil and political.
As every sign points to poverty having
grown and continuing to grow in the
developing world, this circle bears
directly on the prospects for
sustainability, although it is seldom
talked about.
The number of people living in
poverty—on the equivalent of a dollar a
day or less—which the World Bank
placed at 1.1 billion in 1985, is now
estimated to have reached around 1.2
billion. The United Nations expects this
figure to touch 1.3 billion by 2000 and
probably 1.5 billion by 2025—an inexo-
rable expansion in the number of human
beings condemned to lives of deprivation
and desperation. Among children under
APRIL-JUNE 1993
-------
five, 180 million are reported to suffer
from serious malnutrition, while 14
million die annually—most of them from
preventable causes. In many parts of the
developing world, notably sub-Saharan
Africa and Latin America, there have
been sharply reduced economic growth
rates, falls in real per capita income,
rising unemployment, and cutbacks in
education and health care.
The implications of such marginal
existence are that for people the priority
is survival and that for governments the
reality is powerlessness. Strategies for
sustainable development are the best
options for survival, but they present
themselves as alternative pathways; their
adoption presupposes a capacity to act
and a horizon farther away than tomor-
row. Since survival in many developing
countries does connote making it to
tomorrow, governments feel impelled to
opt for short-term gains. The best chance
for sustainability, then, lies in poor
societies, themselves, choosing the path
that their own long-term interests
require. One way of improving the odds
is to strengthen the capacity of people at
the community level, so that the impetus
for sustainability does not have to come
entirely from governments.
This implies a larger role for nongov-
ernmental organizations. More funda-
mentally, it means developing a free
society in the true sense of the word.
Formal democracy through elections is
only the beginning. Much more is
What's in Agenda 21?
The Preamble outlines the purpose,
scope, intent, and some of the
terminology used throughout the text
of Agenda 21.
Section 1, "Social and Economic
Dimensions," includes recom-
mended actions on: sustainable
development cooperation, poverty,
consumption, demographics, health,
human settlements, and integration of
environment and development in
decision making.
Section 2, "Conservation and
Management of Resources for
Development," includes chapters on
atmospheric protection, land re-
sources, deforestation, desertification
and drought, mountains, agriculture,
biological diversity, biotechnology,
oceans, freshwater resources, toxic
chemicals, hazardous wastes, solid
wastes, and radioactive wastes.
Section 3, "Strengthening the
Role of Major Groups," includes
ways to increase the participation in
sustainable development efforts of
major social groups: women, youth,
indigenous peoples, nongovern-
mental organizations, local authori-
ties, trade unions, business and
industry, scientific and technologi-
cal communities, and farmers.
Section 4, "Means of Implemen-
tation/' comprises chapters on
financial resources; technology
transfer, cooperation, and capacity
building; science; education, public
awareness, and training; institu-
tional arrangements; legal instru-
ments and mechanisms; and
information collection, analysis, and
dissemination.
—Kathy Sessions
required to establish the conditions of
civil society. When everything has been
said about international regimes, about
industrial country policies, and about
governmental programs for sustainable
development, sustainability in the
developing world—perhaps not unlike
sustainability in developed countries—
will depend on the capacities of people
to discern the pathway of sustainable
living and to take it. •
This boy was born retarded, deaf, and almost
mute. Doctors believe he suffered prenatal
lead poisoning attributable to a landfill near
his Bangkok home. Environmental stresses
are coupled with inadequate access to health
care in many developing countries.
14
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Building the Capacity
for Change
The world stands ill-prepared to address problems
that cut across sectors and boundaries
by Kathy Sessions
"It is much harder to ask the right
question than to find the right answer
and even the right answer to the wrong
question isn't worth much."
—Elting Morison,
Men, Machines, and Modern Times
It is already a truism to say that the
United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development
(UNCED) heralded a new global commit-
ment to sustainable development,
premised on the interconnectedness of
human activity and the environment.
Also widely accepted is the notion that
"capacity building" is needed, from the
grassroots to the global level, to translate
this new commitment into reality.
Capacity building usually is under-
stood to mean helping governments,
communities, and individuals develop
the skills and expertise needed to achieve
their goals. Capacity-building programs,
often designed to strengthen participants'
abilities to evaluate their policy choices
and implement decisions effectively, may
include education and training, institu-
tional and legal reforms, as well as
scientific, technological, and financial
assistance.
Ask what specific capacity building is
needed to achieve sustainable develop
ment, and you will get many answers,
reflecting conflicting opinions about
(Sessions is a senior policy analyst in the
Washington Office of the United Nations
Association of the U.S.A.)
more basic questions such as, What is
sustainable development? What are the
first priorities for action among the
myriad environmental and economic
goals set out in Rio? And whose capaci-
ties are to be strengthened— from
governments and international institu-
tions to markets and nongovernmental
organizations—to play what roles?
At first glance, the official products of
UNCED are of little help. None provide
a succinct definition of "sustainable
development." The Rio Declaration on
Environment and Development's 27
principles are more a list of North-South
compromises than coherent guidelines
for sustainability. And Agenda 21,
UNCED's mammoth action plan,
recommends more than 2,500 actions in
150 program areas, without explicit
prioritization.
Look a bit deeper, however, and the
UNCED agreements provide fairly clear,
if tentative, lessors for capacity building
on the road from Rio.
Governments from all kinds of
countries acknowledged at UNCED that
the well being of current and future
generations are interconnected—by
ecosystems and markets, communica-
tions and migrations—and that meeting
human needs will require decision
making that can cope with these inter-
connections. Most governments a re
better suited to handle an array of
specific concerns—such as energy or
waste management—than to deal with
the relationships behoeen sectors. And
the capacities of the world community to
address problems that cut across either
sectors or national boundaries are quite
weak. For now, the lack of definition of
sustainable development may be a
"constructive ambiguity," because it has
engaged nations in a process of discov-
ery about the interrelationships of their
worlds.
Building capacities for sustainable
development cannot be seen merely as
developing technical expertise in various
sectors. The biggest challenge is to
develop decision-making processes, from
the local to the global level, that involve
input from all relevant actors and that
are designed to deal with the relation-
ships between sectors and between
COTtttTiVtTOtieS.
UNCED took at least two steps in this
direction, the first being Agenda 21 itself.
The two-and-one-half year negotiation of
the action plan—involving delegates
from nearly 180 countries and hundreds
of outside experts—was an experimental
process for building consensus on a
global sustainable development work
plan. The final product combines
recommendations for sectorial actions
with suggestions for integrating environ-
mental and economic considerations in
decision making. The centerpiece is a
recommendation that national govern-
ments and local communities prepare
their own "Agenda 21" plans, not as
ends in themselves but rather as tools for
exploring the linkages among a wide
range of policy decisions and their
impacts on current and future genera-
tions.
APRIL-JUNE 1993
15
-------
Agenda 21 emphasizes the impor-
tance of broad social participation in
these and other decision-making pro-
cesses, devoting an entire section to
means of "strengthening the roles of
major groups" as important partners,
including business and industry, labor,
farmers, indigenous peoples, women,
youth, local authorities, scientific and
technical communities, and nongovern-
mental organizations (NGOs).
A Permanent Forum Created
A second step taken by UNCED to
strengthen global decision-making
capacities was a decision to create a high-
level U.N. Commission on Sustainable
Development (CSD) to serve as a
permanent forum through which
governments could review progress
toward the goals of UNCED and inte-
grate economic and environmental
policy making.
Since then, the U.N. General Assem-
bly and its Economic and Social Council
have moved to establish the CSD. In
February, they elected the United States
and 52 other states as charter members of
the new commission and scheduled its
first substantive session for June 14-25,
1993, in New York City.
The CSD will meet for two to three
weeks each year. It will review reports
from governments and international
organizations of their efforts to imple-
ment Agenda 21, discuss financial and
tedinical resource issues, and recom-
mend further actions to promote sustain-
able development. "Cross-sectorial"
issues such as financing and capacity
building will be discussed annually;
sectorial issues will be considered as part
of a multi-year review of Agenda 21
beginning in 1994. As in UNCED, a
range of NGOs will participate as
observers, submitting reports and
representing their constituencies. Each
CSD session will conclude with a short
ministerial meeting to give political
impetus to its work and to discuss urgent
and emerging concerns about the
environment and development.
The CSD's first meeting will be
crucial, shaping expectations as well as
its methods of work. With such short
sessions, commission meetings must be
organized carefully. And much of its
work will have to be done
intersessionally—by working groups,
secretariat staff, and outside experts—
but these arrangements have yet to be
resolved.
Getting the CSD underway wili still
leave significant gaps in global decision-
making capacities. Some environmental-
ists initially hoped that the CSD could act
as a watchdog to monitor compliance of
governments and international institu-
tions with environmental agreements,
much as the Human Rights Commission
does in its field. Yet the CSD's mandate
is sustainable development—integrating
environmental and economic objec-
tives—rather than just environmental
protection, and there are few widely
accepted standards in this evolving area
by which the body could evaluate
behavior. It falls to the CSD itself to
build consensus on norms of behavior
which, over time, could provide a basis
for more effective monitoring and
compliance.
The new CSD is, in the words of one
U.N. diplomat, a new room in a house
under renovation. While broader U.N.
reform initiatives may eventually
streamline the labyrinth of U.N. eco-
nomic, social, and environmental efforts,
the new commission begins with no
budgetary authority over other U.N.
bodies or over the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, which
have direct impacts on socioeconomic
and environmental welfare. North-South
disagreements, not only over economic
policies but over the mechanisms for
decision making, continue to fragment
power between the one-state, one-vote
bodies of the U.N.—enjoying political
legitimacy but unable to command
resources—and the one-dollar, one-vote
international financial institutions—
enjoying the confidence of donors but not
broad legitimacy.
The CSD will rely on political rather
than legal authority to integrate global
environmental and economic policies.
Its success will depend heavily upon the
quality of participation from national
governments, including the reports and
Reprinted with permission.
16
EPA JOURNAL
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information they provide, the technical
expertise and political authority their
delegates bring, and the degree to which
these governments reinforce CSD
decisions through national representa-
tives to other international forums.
Governments must ensure that the CSD
secretariat has adequate resources to
fulfill its formidable mission of integrat-
ing information from a complex array of
sources and maintaining momentum
between sessions. They also should
schedule CSD sessions to follow other
relevant international meetings to enable
the CSD to integrate and build on work
being done elsewhere.
It comes down to political will: If the
United States and other countries use the
new commission to build consensus on
global sustainable development goals,
and if the countries reinforce that
consensus through their national and
international efforts, the CSD in turn can
greatly strengthen their collective
capacities to tackle environment and
development problems.
Much also depends upon govern-
ments complementing this global effort
by creating similar decision-making
processes at regional, national, and
local levels. National governments in
particular must improve their ability to
address sustainable development
problems in a holistic manner, includ-
ing participatory processes for consul-
tation and mechanisms to coordinate
national sustainable development
efforts.
Basic infrastructure is sorely lacking in many developing countries. These
Bogota workers are installing water pipes.
A Need for New Partnerships
People began with different agendas,
along the road to Rio. Many participants
from industrialized countries sought
agreements to address urgent environ-
mental problems such as deforestation,
climate change, and the rapid loss of
biological diversity. Participants from
developing countries and those coun-
tries making the transition away from
communism were determined to defend
the right to development of the world's
poor majority and to share the burden of
change with industriali/.ed countries
whose own economic development
patterns have had serious environmental
consequences.
In the process of negotiations, most
delegates began to acknowledge the
common stake shared by all states in
resolving the interrelated problems of
environmental degradation, poverty, and
population pressures. Representatives of
industrialized countries accepted a
special obligation to help poorer coun-
tries build the capacities to make a
transition to more sustainable paths of
development, not as charity but as
investments for shared benefit. This
emphasis on "common but differentiated
responsibilities" may prove to be one of
LJNCED's most important legacies,
pointing to the potential of sustainable
development capacity building as a new
rationale for, and new approach to,
development assistance.
Such an approach could have signifi-
cant implications for U.S. foreign
assistance. A Bread for the World study
recently concluded that the United States
spent only about one out of every four
dollars in its fiscal year 1993 foreign aid
budget on programs whose objectives
are consistent with sustainable develop-
ment and humanitarian goals. The study
acknowledged that some foreign aid
dollars are allocated for other worth-
while objectives, such as conflict man-
agement and international coordination.
It ultimately concluded, however, that
many of the international economic
activities currently supported in the
foreign aid budget should be reevalu-
ated, reduced, or redirected, allowing for
a doubling of the amount devoted to
sustainable development.
Agenda 21 highlights several areas
where partnerships for capacity building
are needed. For starters, each country is
urged to review its national capacities
and capacity-building needs for develop-
APRIL-JUNE 1993
17
-------
ing national sustainable development
strategies. Donors are urged to provide
financial and technical assistance for
these reviews and for countries' subse-
quent efforts to implement their Agenda
21 plans.
Agenda 21 also highlights the need for
improved information collection,
analysis, and dissemination. It calls for
international cooperation on global
environmental monitoring and assess-
ment through the Earth watch program
of the U.N. Environment Program
(UNEP). LfNEP also is given the lead in
developing techniques like full-cost
accounting, which would provide
decision makers with more accurate
reflections of the costs and benefits of
A Guide to International Organizations
Agency for International Development—AID is the principal U.S. govern-
ment development assistance agency. AID's central Office of Environment
and Natural Resources supports a series of technical assistance and support
projects for all AID field missions; geographic bureaus and field missions
provide funding for a broad range of environmental and natural resource
programs.
Global Environment Facility—Established in 1990 through cooperation
among the World Bank, UNEP, and UNDP, the GEF is an experiment in
providing low- or no-interest loans for programs in four areas: protection of
the ozone layer, reduction of greenhouse gases, protection of international
water resources, and protection of biodiversity.
International Development Association—An affiliate of the World Bank,
IDA is a lending agency intended to finance development projects in the
poorer member countries for the same general purposes as the World Bank.
International Monetary Fund—The IMF is a specialized agency of the United
Nations that aims to promote international monetary cooperation and
stabilization of currencies, to facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of
world trade, and to help member countries meet temporary difficulties in
foreign payments.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—OECD pro-
motes economic and social welfare in member countries and harmonious
development of the world economy. Members of OECD are the industrialized
countries of North America and Western Europe, and Australia, Japan, and
New Zealand.
United Nations Development Program—UNDP is the United Nations'
central agency for funding economic and social development projects around
the world. It is intended to help developing countries increase the wealth-
producing capabilities of their natural and human resources.
United Nations Environment Program—UNEP is the U.N. agency intended
to cover the major environmental issues facing both the developed and the
developing areas of the world. UNEP also is responsible for promoting
environmental law and education and training for the management of the
environment.
World Bank—Officially named the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development, the World Bank is the leading organization in the field of
multilateral financing of investment and technical assistance. Beginning
operations in 1946, this specialized agency of the United Nations originally
was concerned with reconstruction of Europe after World War II and now
provides assistance to developing nations and the underdeveloped areas of
the Western world.
—Eds.
Sources: International Organizations: A Dictionary and Directory fry Giuscpiie Schiavone (St.
lames Press, 1983); World Directory of Environmental Organizations f>y Thaddeus Tn/zna and
Robert Chiides (California Institute of Public Affairs. 1992).
their actions.
A related priority is the need for
environmentally sound technologies.
During the UNCED negotiations, a
U.S.-led effort to redirect debate from
"technology transfer" toward "technol-
ogy cooperation" was received with
cautious interest by negotiators from
developing countries.
Recommendations that emerged in
Agenda 21 included calls for the
development of regional information
clearinghouses and research networks
to help link national and global infor-
mation on environmentally sound
technologies. International assistance is
requested to build developing coun-
tries' national capacities to assess and
adopt appropriate technologies.
Governments are encouraged both to
share publicly available technologies
with poorer countries and to provide
incentives to the private sector to share
privately owned technologies.
Beyond decision making and informa-
tional capacities, Agenda 21 places major
emphasis on human resources. This
reflects a broader acknowledgement of
the need to refocus development assis-
tance on building indigenous capacities,
recognizing that too often traditional
"technical assistance" funding has been
spent on expatriate experts whose work
fails to strengthen local ownership of or
capacities to sustain their activities.
Agenda 21 gives the U.N. Develop-
ment Program (UNDP) the primary
responsibility for mobilizing and
coordinating international capacity-
building assistance. In response, UNDP
has initiated a "Capacity 21" program
designed "to help governments build the
capacity to formulate and implement
national programs of sustainable
development." The program is intended
to help initiate capacity-building efforts
that would ultimately be mainstreamed
into ongoing development efforts.
Words Come Easier Than Money
Enthusiastic verbal commitments made
by heads of state in Rio failed to translate
into much financial support. UNCED
negotiators had wrangled over how
sustainable development assistance
should be handled, with the "Group of
77" bloc of nearly 130 developing
countries pressing for the creation of a
new, democratically controlled "Green
18
EPA JOURNAL
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Low-tech operation: A camel operates a community well in Bangladesh. Agenda 21 calls for regional information
clearinghouses and research networks to share information on environmentally sound technologies.
Fund," and the industrialized country
governments favoring the donor-
controlled Global Environment Facility.
By the end, such disagreements over
financing mechanisms became less
significant than the fact that little new
money was available through any
mechanism. The governments did
agree that "new and additional"
resources would be needed to finance
Agenda 21 through a variety of mecha-
nisms, although most of the responsi-
bility for financing national efforts falls
to each country. They also agreed that
the "cost of inaction could outweigh
the financial costs of implementing
Agenda 21."
But industrialized countries' domestic
preoccupations, preexisting foreign aid
commitments, and a global recession
appeared to confound their stated desire
to provide support. Southern govern-
ments in turn made clear that their
commitment to implement Agenda 21
was contingent on assistance from their
Northern neighbors. The U.N. system—
including UNEP and UNDP—also was
given significant new responsibilities
without clear commitments of resources
to fulfill those tasks. Some pledges made
at Rio, like that of the European Commu-
nity of about $4 billion for Agenda 21,
were offered without clarifying whether
this was new or only redirected assis-
tance.
The tacit agreement reached in Rio
that donors would add an "Earth
Increment" to the next replenishment of
the International Development Associa-
tion, the branch of the World Bank which
makes interest-free loans to the poorest
countries, has yet to move forward. A
pledging conference at the 47th General
Assembly last fall did yield some
increased offerings for development
activities, among those a U.S. pledge for
increased bilateral and multilateral
development assistance in 1993, but
again these came amidst confusion
regarding their relationship to Rio goals.
UNDP's efforts to raise $100 million for
Capacity 21 have brought in only $30
million to $40 million in pledges but
almost nothing in hand.
Serious questions remain for both
donor and recipient countries about the
ability of existing development efforts to
build effective sustainable development
capacities, fueling increasing concern for
the quality as well as quantity of funds
spent. And UNCED's political reach did
not extend, by and large, to the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade, transnational corporations, or
other major actors whose decisions are
likely to have far greater impacts on
economic and environmental
sustainability than will development
assistance.
In many ways UNCED mirrored
domestic concerns with the quality of
human life enjoyed by citizens now and
in the future. Americans share with
others around the world a hope that the
end of the cold war creates new opportu-
nities to meet human needs. Taking
UNCED's lessons to heart could help
reinvigorate our awareness of the
necessity of working within a global
community to build capacities for change
in a world order premised on
sustainability, equity, prosperity, and
security for all. •
APRIL-JUNE 1993
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Deforestation and the
Frontier Lands
Costa Rica illustrates how economic problems
can lead to environmental crisis
by Carrie Meyer
An examination of the degrada-
tion of Costa Rica's forests and
soils during the 1970s and early
1980s illustrates one facet of the concept
of sustainable development: A troubled
economy can lead to a degraded environ-
ment.
Almost 70 percent of Costa Rica's total
land area is suitable only for forests; yet,
because of rapid deforestation during the
past two decades, today less than 40
percent of the land is under forests. Once
the forests were cut, soils that had
sustained them were quickly lost.
Between 1970 and 1989, an estimated 2.2
billion metric tons of soil were eroded in
Costa Rica. Had the loss of these natural
assets been recorded, the annual depre-
ciation of soil and forest assets would
have amounted to more than 5 percent of
the Costa Rican gross domestic product
(GDP) between 1970 and 1989.
Costa Rica's land policies, economic
subsidies, and the government's han-
dling of the debt crisis of the early 1980s
can be directly linked to the destruction
of the forest lands, as those policies
encouraged the nation's rapidly growing
and ptxir population to move out onto
the forested, or "frontier," lands.
Among the policies that led to Costa
Rica's troubles were incentives provided
(Dr. Meyer is an Associate of the World
Resources Institute (WRJ) and coauthor of
WRis October 1992 report, Population
Growth, Poverty, and Environmental
Stress: Frontier Migration in the Philip-
pines and Costa Rica.)
to cattle ranchers, such as subsidized
credit and preferential exchange rates, to
encourage them to produce beef for
export. From the 1960s to the late 1970s,
beef exports increased over 500 percent,
and forests were cut to make grazing
lands for the beef. Between 1963 and
1984, pastureland almost doubled, rising
to 54 percent of the country's land area.
However, as the Tropical Science Center
in San Jose points out, only about 10
percent of Costa Rica's territory is suitable
for pasture, implying that forests were
squandered and soil resources washed
away as steep and fragile slopes became
pastureland. Pastures also encroached on
good agricultural land, while small farmers
struggled to grow subsistence crops on
steep and eroding slopes.
Poverty and unequal access to income
and land are also part of the picture. In
1986, the poorest fifth of the population
With city jobs scarce during the recession of the 1980s, many of Costa Rica's urban poor took
refuge in rural areas. Farming lands unsuitable for agriculture, they carved out a meager
existence at best.
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received only 3.3 percent of national
income, while the richest 10 percent
received 38.8 percent. Land distribution
was equally skewed. In 1984,42 percent
of the nation's farms were too small to
support a family, while farms larger than
200 hectares tied up almost half of all
agricultural land. High birth rates,
especially in rural areas, meant that more
and more peasants were forced to
migrate in search of land or employment.
Costa Rica's traditional land tenure
policies also have exacerbated the
destruction of frontier lands. Squatters
were traditionally granted provisional
rights to any under-utilized public or
private land that they occupied for a
year, if they "improved" the land by at
least partially clearing it. They could
then sell the land to a speculator or a
cattle rancher who could receive full title.
With government incentives for cattle
ranching buoying demand for pasture,
"professional squatters" had a compel-
ling reason to clear land merely to sell
their "improvements" and then move on
to repeat the process elsewhere in the
forests.
The "debt crisis" that hit Costa Rica in
the early 1980s brought burgeoning
unemployment and plummeting real
wages, and pushed many more landless
peasants toward the frontiers in search of
subsistence. The roots of that crisis can
be traced to the early 1970s, when
economic policies biased toward indus-
try undermined the basis for sustained
economic growth. The growth Costa
Rica experienced later in the decade was
maintained only by rapid expansion in
the government sector, which was
financed by foreign loans. In 1974, Costa
Rica's total long-term debt was $21.3
million (in 1984 dollars). By 1979, the
debt had multiplied 13-fold and equalled
10 percent of GDP.
Due to a weakening global economy,
falling commodity prices, and rising
interest rates, Costa Rica found it
impossible to service its debts and
declared a moratorium on interest
payments in 1981. To obtain approval
for new loans from the International
Monetary Fund, the government
adopted a stabilization plan that cut
government expenditures by 28 percent
between 1980 and 1982. This dramatic
contraction in the government sector led
the downturn of the rest of the economy.
Most of Costa Rica makes poor pastureland: nevertheless, many forested
acres were cleared in the 1960s and 1970s so that beef could be produced
for export. Remaining forests show up dark in the background.
In just two years—1981 and 1982—
unemployment doubled and real wages
dropped by 30 percent.
Rural areas became the refuge for
those with nowhere else to turn. While
migration from rural to urban areas was
a major feature of the 1970s, during the
five-year period leading up to 1984—
which included the two years of deep
recession—more migrants left the
metropolitan area than entered it. At the
same time, the net number of those
leaving rural areas whose land resources
were ranked as "poor" or "very poor"
dropped dramatically. Four times as
many squatters received rights to land in
the period of economic crisis as did in the
earlier census period. The vast majority
of these settled in districts with poor or
very poor lands—lands that were
unsuitable for agriculture.
Fortunately, although Costa Rica's
economic crisis was deep, it was also
short-lived. Between 1977 and 1983, the
number of people living below the
poverty line swelled by 30 percent, but
by 1986 it had fallen again to its earlier
level. Because the economic recovery
was led by growth in agriculture, the
poorest people benefit ted the most.
Between 1981 and 1989, the incidence of
poverty fell from 25.4 percent to 10.2
percent, even as per-capita income
declined. Today, the Costa Rican
government has better positioned itself
to encourage both economic growth and
environmental protection. The structural
adjustment policies Costa Rica adopted
in the early 1980s laid a firm foundation
for its economic future. The nation has
also moved to protect its natural re-
source base by repealing the economic
incentives that encouraged beef exports
and reforming land-tenure policies that
encouraged forest clearing. •
APRIL-JUNE 1993
/'I
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The World Bank's
Post-Rio Strategy
The bank plans to follow through on Agenda 21
by Mohamed T. EI-Ashry
wenty years ago, popular
consensus held that the goals of
economic development and
environmental protection were mutually
exclusive. Economic development was
believed to be unavoidably destructive to
the environment and environmental
protection was considered a constraint to
development. Today, this dichotomous
view has largely given way to a better
understanding of the linkages between
development and the environment. The
accords agreed to at the United Nations
Conference on Environment and Devel-
opment (UNCED) indicate that develop-
ment policy makers have come to realize
that degradation of the environment and
depletion of valuable natural resources
not only impede economic development
but threaten human survival. At Rio, the
world community reached an unprec-
edented consensus on the need to fully
integrate environmental concerns into
the mainstream of economic decision
making. This is essential for successfully
redirecting the economic, demographic,
and political forces that underlie envi-
ronmental degradation at both local and
global levels.
To ensure that this vision materializes,
however, we need to move beyond
agreement on the need for better and
integrated policies and on to their
effective implementation. We must learn
(El-Ashry is Chief Environmental Advisor
to the President and Director of Environ-
ment at the World Bank.)
how to operationalize sustainable
development, and equipped with that
knowledge, we must set about dosing
the gap between the rhetoric of sustain-
able development and its limited practice
in the field. Regrettably, national and
international institutions—the World
Bank included—have in the past not
fully met this challenge of implementa-
tion. The poverty, hunger, and disease
suffered by millions in the developing
world demand that we do better.
Agenda 21—the main operational
product of UNCED—provides the post-
Rio world with a starting point. A
remarkably comprehensive document, it
guides the implementation of national
and international policies in support of
sustainable development into the coming
century. Agenda 21 also embodies one
of UNCED's major themes—that
concerted action and shared responsibil-
ity by developed and developing
countries are crucial for addressing the
linkages between development and the
environment.
What role should the World Bank
play in response to the Earth Summit's
clarion call for sustainable development?
With its long-standing commitment to
poverty reduction and uniquely diverse
capacity—in technical assistance, project
finance, policy dialogue, and research—
the bank is well placed to adopt, and
follow through on, the holistic approach
championed by Agenda 21. The Earth
Summit and the bank's own 1992 World
Development Report on Development
and the Environment provided the
impetus and intellectual foundation for
the bank's current four-point strategy for
sustainable development, outlined
below:
• Environmental Assessment The first
component of this strategy is the devel-
opment of a comprehensive environmen-
tal assessment procedure which aims to
ensure that development options under
consideration are environmentally sound
and sustainable. All projects the bank
helps to finance—other than those such
as education or family planning projects,
which are unlikely to have direct,
adverse environmental consequences—
must undergo an environmental analysis
or a full environmental assessment,
depending on their potential environ-
mental impacts. Borrowers' environ-
mental assessment capabilities are
strengthened by methodological,
technical, and staffing assistance pro-
vided by the bank, and internal bank
support for environmental assessment
has been bolstered until borrowers'
capacities have improved.
Environmental assessment is a vital
first step. It recognizes and responds to a
powerful reality: If soils are damaged,
aquifers depleted, and ecosystems
disrupted, then regardless of any short-
term income benefits, the long-run
prospects for development will be
undermined. But environmental
assessment is only part of a strategy for
sustainable development. With the
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EPA JOURNAL
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Better access to education can help break the cycle of poverty, population growth, and environmental degradation. The World
Bank plans increased funding for education, health, nutrition, and family planning. This primary school is in Calcutta.
addition of four billion people to our
numbers over the next 40 years, it is not
enough simply to protect the environ-
ment and promote economic growth.
We must strike at the roots of poverty.
• Reduction of Poverty. The second
component of the bank's strategy for
sustainable development builds on the
relationships between poverty allevia-
tion, economic efficiency, and environ-
mental quality. More than any other
influence on the environment, none is as
immediately powerful as poverty. For
the poor just to survive, they are
compelled to take what they can from
the land today, and they lack the means
to conserve their natural resources for
tomorrow. Yet, they suffer most directly
and severely when these resources
deteriorate.
To improve the environmental health
of developing countries, we must attack
the political consequences of poverty as
well as its economic basis. Poor people
are often politically marginalized and
excluded from the decision-making and
policy-implementation processes. Local
community participation and consulta-
tion can change this by establishing the
legitimacy of development efforts and
policies at the outset, building powerful
constituencies for environmental
stewardship, and greatly improving the
prospects for successful implementation.
The key to effective change is empower-
ing the poor to break the vicious cycle of
poverty, population growth, and
environmental degradation.
This means better access to education
and social services as well as a voice in
and "ownership" of development efforts
that affect them. The bank's annual
social sector lending is projected to aver-
age about $5 billion over the next three
years. Lending for clean water and sani-
tation is expected to double, and invest-
ments in education, health, nutrition, and
family planning are expected to increase
by two-thirds. And with the 10th grant
refunding of the International Develop-
ment Association (IDA)—the lending
arm of the bank—IDA has pledged a
stronger attack on poverty in the poorest
countries of Southeast Asia, Africa, and
Latin America. Particular emphasis will
be on poverty reduction, family plan-
ning, and social services for women in
these areas.
Building on the synergy between
poverty reduction and economic effi-
ciency also has a powerful impact on the
environment. The bank is working with
its borrowers to develop policies that can
provide both substantial economic and
environmental benefits, such as the
elimination of subsidies for environmen-
tally harmful activities, clarification of
property rights, and liberalization of
trade. The elimination of energy subsi-
dies in developing countries, for in-
stance, would save governments nearly
$230 billion each year with a dramatic
APRIL-JUNE 1993
23
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""• •. ~
'• -/• ••
Ten countries, including the Philippines, have national environmental act/on plans that will help foster sustainable development. These terraced
rice fields are part of a Philippine project studying the comparative success of different strains.
impact on air quality. Where the links
between poverty and the environment
are not so positively related, policy
measures can minimize the tradeoffs by
targeting environmentally destructive
behavior with market-based incentives,
such as taxes or charges, or government
regulations. A recent study of air
pollution from transport in Mexico City,
conducted by the bank and the Mexican
regulatory authorities, recommended a
mix of such policies—mandated emis-
sion standards, fuel improvements, and a
gasoline tax—some of which the city has
already begun to implement.
• Setting Priorities and Defining
National Strategies. The third part of the
bank's post-UNCED strategy is to assist
member countries in setting priorities,
building institutions, and formulating
targeted policies for environmental
stewardship. To this end, the bank
continues to provide advice and help
arrange technical assistance for countries
in the preparation of their national
environmental action plans (EAPs). The
EAP process aids government decision
makers in environmental planning and
investment strategies by reviewing
environmental priorities and identifying
required policy actions, investments, and
institutional changes, coordinated across
economic and social sectors. EAPs also
facilitate policy dialogue between
donors, recipients, and beneficiaries, as
their development is based on a process
of popular participation at all levels of
the community. Ten such action plans—
for Burkina Faso, Egypt, The Gambia,
Ghana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Nigeria,
Rwanda, the Philippines, and Sri
Lanka—have been completed by IDA
countries thus far. Nineteen more are
expected by the close of the bank's 1993
fiscal year. Regional environmental
action plans are also underway (e.g., in
Central and Eastern Europe and in
Africa) to address environmental
problems that transcend national
borders.
Environmental action plans explicitly
recognize that the environment cannot be
sectorially delineated. By integrating
sustainability considerations into a
country's entire development strategy,
EAPs represent the holistic, cross-
sectoral approach called for by Agenda
21. They also help development assis-
tance institutions and donor agencies set
their own appropriate targets and
funding priorities. The bank's own
country assistance strategies are rein-
forced by analytical and policy work
done as part of national EAPs.
• Global Environment Facility. The
fourth and final component of the bank's
strategy calls for addressing interna-
tional environmental challenges through
participation in the Global Environment
Facility (GEE). Two important conven-
tions, dealing with biodiversity conser-
vation and climate change, were signed
in Rio, and the GEE has emerged as both
a facilitator and funding mechanism to
secure the participation of developing
countries in realizing the goals of the Rio
conventions and for integrating global
environmental concerns into the devel-
opment process.
Established in 1990 as a three-year
pilot program to address global environ-
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EPA JOURNAL
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mental issues of climate change, ozone
depletion, loss of biodiversity, and
pollution of international waters, the
GEF is implemented by the U.N. Devel-
opment Program, the U.N. Environment
Program, and the World Bank. The GEF
provides a reasonably large volume of
additional resources to developing
countries to invest in global environmen-
tal protection. In total, industrialized
and developing countries have pledged
some $1.3 billion to the facility for
commitment over the three-year pilot
phase. The facility is also uniquely
important because it is specifically
designed to serve the interests of the
world as a whole. Protection of the
global commons has typically been
considered a classically unresolvable
problem of collective action, but at
UNCED, the international community
rose to the challenge of defending the
global commons from further degrada-
tion. The GEF stands as the practical
manifestation of that resolve. A number
of donors pledged in Rio a two-to-three-
fold increase in its resources beyond the
pilot phase.
In the transition from pilot to perma-
nent status, the GEF is undergoing a
number of important institutional
adjustments. Membership will become
universal—any country that wishes to
join the GEF will have the opportunity to
do so without paying a membership fee,
and can join the current restructuring
discussions. Efforts are underway to
establish decision-making procedures
within the facility that guarantee a
balanced and equitable representation of
the interests of developing countries
while giving due weight to the funding
efforts of donors. The GEF is also
working to articulate linkages to the
biodiversity and climate change conven-
tions, and to assist developing countries
in the formulation of their national action
plans and strategies under these conven-
tions. A major challenge for the GEF is
how it can play the catalytic role of
integrating global environmental
considerations into the regular develop-
ment assistance programs sponsored or
co-financed by bilateral and multilateral
agencies—particularly in the areas of
energy planning and development, forest
management, and agriculture. Another
challenge is integrating the global actions
it supports into country priorities and
national sustainable development plans.
The GEF illustrates a new approach to
North-South cooperation on the impor-
More emphasis is
being given to
social and cultural
issues, such as the
role of women in
development....
tant issues of global environment as they
relate to sustainable development in
developing countries. Institutionally, it
may be a model for broader international
cooperation without setting up new
bureaucracies. More important, I believe
the GEF points to a willingness on the
part of the world's wealthier states to
safeguard the inheritance of future
generations by helping developing
countries mitigate their growing contri-
bution to global environmental degrada-
tion.
Behind the transition from policy
integration to implementation at the
World Bank is a spectrum of research
and analysis that informs policy making
for environmentally sound development.
The research efforts of the bank's
environment department and other
sector departments emphasize the
integration of environmental concerns
into the bank's policy work through, for
example, the economic valuation of
environmental "goods" and "bads" and
improving efficiency in energy produc-
tion and use. More emphasis is being
given to social and cultural issues, such
as the role of women in development,
cultural heritage and indigenous
peoples, and the challenges of equitable
resettlement practices. To this end, a
new division of social policy has been
established in the bank's environment
department.
The challenges of environment and
development are daunting, and the real
work of integration and implementation
lies ahead. International institutions
have a major role to play in bringing
about a new era of international coopera-
tion for sustainable development. We
have accumulated an unprecedented
wealth of scientific knowledge and
improved tools for analysis and predic-
tion, and we have gained the technical
and institutional experience to take
action. Further, the agreements at
UNCED mark the beginning of an
international political will to take the
necessary steps to protect the earth on
which our survival depends. •
Environmental Indicators at Different Country Income Levels
Urban population
without adequate sanitation
70 Percem
Municipal wastes
per capita
Kilograms
100,000
100 1.000
Per capita income (dollars, log scale)
Note: Estimates are based on cross-country regression analysis of data from the 1980's.
Source: World Bank
Carbon dioxide emissions
per capita*
'DC 1.000
"Emissions are from fossil fuels
100.000
APRIL-JUNE 1993
25
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Can the World Bank
Be Reformed?
The bank's record on promoting
sustainable development is poor
by Korinna Horta
M
r. El-Ashiy's article acknowl-
edges that protecting the
environment is not separate
from development and poverty reduc-
tion, but that, indeed, it is the basis for all
economic activity and ultimately human
survival. This represents an important
departure from the still widely held view
of a tradeoff between economic develop-
ment and environmental quality. Equally
important is Mr. El-Ashry's recognition
that environmental concerns must be
fully taken into account by mainstream
economic decision making.
However, the real task at hand is
bridging the gap between the rhetoric of
sustainable development and what is
actually happening. The same institu-
tional barriers that prevented the World
Bank from financing environmentally
sustainable programs in the past con-
tinue to be at work today.
The World Bank, the world's largest
development agency, is widely viewed
by both environmental and development
organizations as an institution that
continues to be incapable of promoting
environmentally sustainable develop-
ment. Environmental organizations in
both developed and developing coun-
tries have accumulated widespread
evidence that World Bank financed
projects often lead to environmental
destruction and social disruption and
that very little attention is being paid by
the World Bank to the degradation of
(Horta is an economist with the Environmen-
tal Defense Fund.)
natural resources and increasing poverty
that arise from many of the policy
reforms the bank promotes through its
structural adjustment programs. World
Bank forestry-sector loans to the West
Africa countries of Ghana and the Ivory
Coast are examples of a lack of attention
to the environment and the needs of local
people.
After years of international criticism
and pressure on part of nongovernmen-
tal organizations and some parliaments,
including numerous legislative efforts by
the U.S. Congress, the World Bank
launched in 1987 widely publicized
environmental reforms. While these
reforms have led to vastly increased
environmental staff at the bank and to
several positive policy statements, such
as the one strengthening the require-
ments for environmental impact assess-
ments, there is mounting evidence that
their impact in field projects has often
been marginal at best.
Interestingly, a recent internal World
Bank report, known as the Wapenhans
Report, named after the bank's now
retired vice president who headed the
task force that wrote the report, identifies
the bank projects' lack of sustainability in
much the same way that environmental
organizations have. The Wapenhans
Report carried out an internal review of
the bank's $140 billion loan portfolio and
reached the disturbing conclusion that,
according to the bank's own criteria on
adequate economic rate of return, nearly
40 percent of recently evaluated projects
are failures. The underlying problem,
according to the report, is that the bank
emphasizes only rapid loan approval
and pays scant attention to the actual
implementation of projects. Environ-
mental organizations have pointed out
for several years that the bank's over-
whelming priority to meet certain
lending targets and its internal structure,
which rewards staff for rapid loan
processing, prevents the institution from
promoting the long-term viability of its
development projects. It also leads to
pervasive violations of the bank's stated
policies, which require consultations
with populations affected by projects,
because these are time consuming and
therefore not conducive to career
advancement of bank staff.
The World Bank's policy of withhold-
ing project documents and reports from
the public in both donor and recipient
countries and from lawmakers and
government entities is another key
institutional barrier that stands in the
way of sustainable development. While
the need for confidentiality of certain
documents may be legitimate for the
borrowing country's national sover-
eignty, there is no justification for
keeping secret relevant environmental
and social information related to World
Bank programs.
There are, for example, no provisions
to ensure that the environmental impact
assessments and national environmental
action plans, mentioned by Mr. El-Ashry
as key elements in the bank's strategy to
achieve sustainable development, are
made public systematically. The World
26
EPA JOURNAL
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Bank refuses to make this environmental
information available to the public,
staring that it is up to the recipient
governments to decide what to do with
it. However, not many governments in
recipient countries choose to grant access
to information and involve the commu-
nities and resource users that are directly
affected by the environmental plans.
More often than not, these planning
exercises are carried out in a top-down
fashion by foreign experts on short-term
missions, and their on-the-ground
impact is questionable. Development
will be sustainable only when local
people are actively consulted. How this
can be achieved without public access to
project information is incomprehensible.
The Global Environment Facility
(GER is largely run by the World Bank,
which administers, chairs, and coordi-
nates the facility and handles all GEF
investment projects. The other two
participating agencies, the U.N. Devel-
opment Program and the U.N. Environ-
ment Program, are very junior partners
in the GEF. As such, the GEF suffers
from many of the same problems as
regular World Bank lending, namely a
highly centralized management struc-
ture focused on rapid project processing
and not on the actual project impact on
the ground, and an overall lack of access
to information and accountability.
In addition, about 80 percent of all
GEF investment projects are mere
components of much larger World Bank
loans, which often undermine the very
same global environmental goals that the
GEF seeks to address. Yet neither the
governments participating in the GEF
nor the GEF's Scientific and Technical
Advisory Panel, which evaluates GEF
project proposals, have full access to
information on the associated World
Bank loans.
Environmental organizations have
documented that, especially in forestry
and energy projects, World Bank loans
are often at odds with the objectives of
biodiversity conservation and reduction
of greenhouse gas emissions that the GEF
seeks to achieve. For example, the World
Rainforest Movement, an international
environmental organization based in
Malaysia, recently produced a study on a
GEF biodiversity protection project that
is attached to a World Bank forest loan
for Laos. The study found that the World
Bank was violating its own policies
designed to protect indigenous peoples,
and that its top-down management
planning for the forest resources of Laos
would reduce access to the forest for
about 50 percent of the country's
population that relies on traditional
forest uses.
Some of the findings of the World
Rainforest Movement were corroborated
by an internal World Bank report.
Although local community involvement
is essential to any long-term conservation
efforts, the internal World Bank report
found that no provisions were made for
a participatory development process in
and around the areas to be protected by
the GEF project.
Mr. El-Ashry's article rightly empha-
sizes the need for integrating global
environmental concerns into the devel-
opment process. The global environ-
ment would greatly benefit if the World
Bank's annual lending operations of
about $25 billion were made consistent
with global environmental goals. This
will require major institutional reforms,
without which sustainable development
will continue to elude us. •
Industrialization ha$ its
price-Global warming
acid rain. Lakes and
river? poisoned. YOU
musUevelop differently
tnanldldit.vouviantip
avoid riw mistakes and
preserve the environment
My
How do | dp about
tting 6fe of
these car
s
By permission of Mike Luckouich and Creators Syndicate,
APRIL-JUNE 1993
27
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Trade-Environment
Tensions
Options exist for reconciling
trade and environment
by Paul Cough
xpansion of world trade and
worsening regional and global
environmental problems
increasingly bring trade and environ-
mental interests into conflict. North-
South tensions, in particular, have
become acute, mainly because of differ-
ences in the scope, stringency, and cost of
national environmental regulations.
These tensions and their root causes
are addressed in the Rio Declaration (see
box) and in Agenda 21. Trade and
environment issues also figure promi-
nently in the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), in the Uruguay
Round of negotiations under the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),
and in the work of such international
bodies as the United Nations Conference
on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
and the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD).
This article examines the principal trade
and environment tensions between
developed and developing countries and
describes some options for resolving
them.
In 1991, a dispute settlement panel
under the GATT found that a U.S. ban
on imports of tuna from Mexico
violated GATT rules. The ban was
imposed because the Mexican tuna
fleet's "incidental" kill rate for dolphins
during tuna harvesting was higher than
that permitted under the U.S. Marine
(Cough manages trade and environment
issues and the OECD portfolio for EPA's
Office of International Activities.)
Mammal Protection Act. The Act also
regulates the U.S. tuna fleet's dolphin
kill rate.
The GATT panel ruled that the US.
could not restrict tuna imports based on
harvesting methods as long as the
methods did not affect the product itself.
It also ruled that the ban could not be
justified under GATT provisions that
allow import restrictions for the purpose
of protecting "human, animal, or plant
life or health" or to conserve exhaustible
resources, because those provisions
apply only to protecting life or health
and conserving resources within the
jurisdiction of the importing country.
The panel's report, which has not yet
been adopted by the GATT Council, is
very troubling to environmentalists, who
are concerned that governments will be
deprived of the use of trade restrictions
to protect the regional and global
environment. While in some cases
alternatives may be available, such as
assisting the exporting country in
changing its production process, lifting
the threat of trade restrictions may
reduce the effectiveness of these alterna-
tives. The question arises: Should
countries be pressured by GATT rules to
become part of the problem by providing
a market for products made in an
environmentally harmful way?
An important factor in the dispute is
whether the environmental impacts of
the production process are confined to
the exporting country or whether they
also affect other countries (especially the
importing country) or the global com-
mons. Also important is whether the
country imposing the import restriction
acts unilaterally, based on its domestic
environmental laws, or whether it acts
pursuant to an international agreement.
In the tuna-dolphin case, the U.S. action
was unilateral and was directed at harm
to the global commons.
Developing countries, in particular,
have characterized the unilateral use of
trade restrictions to address the environ-
mental impacts of production processes
as "eco-imperialism" and a violation of
their sovereignty. In general, countries
are more receptive to the use of trade
restrictions in connection with interna-
tional environmental agreements, such
as the Montreal Protocol on Substances
that Deplete the Ozone Layer. However,
it may not always be possible to negoti-
ate an effective international environ-
mental agreement.
The World Bank estimates that a 50-
percent reduction in agricultural and
industrial trade barriers erected by the
developed countries would increase
developing countries' annual export
earnings by $50 billion, which approxi-
mately equals the value of official
development assistance provided by
the developed countries. If concluded
successfully, the Uruguay Round of
GATT negotiations, discussed below,
may significantly increase developing
countries' export earnings by reducing
such trade barriers, or protectionism.
Under GATT rules, countries are
supposed to treat imported products
"no less favorably" than comparable
goods produced domestically. How-
ever, developing countries are con-
28
EPA JOURNAL
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Aluminum ingots being loaded in
Ghana. Developing countries
have called the unilateral use of
trade restrictions for
environmental reasons "eco-
imperialism."
cerned that some ostensibly environ-
mental standards may actually be
"green" protectionism—standards
designed to favor domestic producers
over foreign competitors.
The Draft Final Act of the Uruguay
Round of the GATT contains new rules
on the use of technical regulations and
standards. These new rules would
cover, for example, environment, health,
and safety regulations pertaining to
agricultural products, chemicals, and
motor vehicles. The rules would require
countries to use the least trade-restrictive
means for achieving environmental
objectives and, in most cases, to use
relevant international standards instead
of national ones. Environmentalists fear
that international standards will become
a ceiling rather than a floor, and will
exert downward pressure on the
environmental standards of developed
countries. They are also concerned that
a least trade-restrictive rule could be
interpreted narrowly by GAIT dispute
panels, threatening domestic regulatory
regimes.
Both developed and developing
countries are concerned about the risks
posed by international trade in hazard-
ous wastes. This trade is addressed, in
part, by the Basel Convention on the
Control of Transboundary Movement of
Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal.
The convention came into force in 1992,
but has yet to be ratified by the United
States.
Trade liberalization makes it more
likely that comparable goods pro-
duced under different environmental
conditions will compete directly for
market share. Environmentalists are
concerned that trade liberalization
may encourage countries to set low
levels of environmental protection—
not only standards, but their enforce-
ment—to reduce production costs and
encourage foreign investment. This, in
turn, may force other countries to
lower their environmental standards
to maintain the competitiveness of
their exports.
For most environmental problems,
the evidence indicates that environmen-
tal expenditures have a minor impact
on international competitiveness.
However, the impact of, say, a large
carbon tax to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions could be very significant if
imposed by some countries and not by
others.
Some suggest that countries with
stringent environmental standards
(primarily developed countries) should
impose duties on imports from coun-
tries with not so stringent standards
(primarily developing countries) to
compensate for differences in expendi-
tures on environmental protection.
Should countries of the North and
South have comparable standards to
protect the environment, health, and
safety? Sustainable development
means, among other things, remaining
"within the carrying capacity of support-
ing ecosystems"; carrying capacity
varies from country to country, depend-
ing on climate, geography, and other
factors, and ecosystems may span
national boundaries. Countries also
differ in the resources they have avail-
able for environmental protection and
the priority they assign it compared to,
say, improved nutrition. Should a
distinction be made between standards
that protect environmental carrying
capacity, which varies from country to
country, and standards that protect
human health and safety?
The GATT came into force in 1948; it
now has 107 "contracting parties," a
majority of them developing countries.
The GATT recognizes the urgency of
raising the living standards of develop-
ing countries and of the "progressive
development" of their economies. It
promotes increased market access
under favorable conditions for their
processed and manufactured products.
It asks contracting parties to expand
trade with developing countries by
harmonizing and adjusting "national
policies and regulations ... [and]
technical and commercial standards
affecting production."
The Uruguay Round of GATT
negotiations has been underway since
1986. A "Draft Final Act Embodying the
Results of the Uruguay Round" has been
prepared, but has not yet been agreed
upon. If concluded successfully, the
APRIL-JUNE 1993
29
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Trade and the Rio Declaration
"States have, in accordance with the
Charter of the United Nations and the
principles of international law, the
sovereign right to exploit their own
resources pursuant to their own
environmental and developmental
policies, and the responsibility to
ensure that activities within their
jurisdiction or control do not cause
damage to the environment of other
States or of areas beyond the limits of
national jurisdiction." (Principle 2)
"States should cooperate to
promote a supportive and open
international economic system that
would lead to economic growth and
sustainable development in all
countries, to better.address the
problems of environmental degrada-
tion. Trade policy measures for
environmental purposes should not
constitute a means of arbitrary or
unjustifiable discrimination or a
disguised restriction on international
trade." (excerpt from Principle 12)
"States should effectively cooper-
ate to discourage or prevent the
relocation and transfer to other States
of any activities and substances that
cause severe environmental degrada-
tion or are found to be harmful to
human health." (Principle 14)
Uruguay Round may improve market
access for developing countries in such
areas as natural resource-based products,
tropical products, agriculture, and
textiles and clothing.
The North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico,
the United States, and Canada was
signed in December 1992 but has not yet
been ratified by Congress. An environ-
mental review of the draft agreement
was performed by the United States
(with EPA participation) and utilized in
negotiations. NAFTA provides that
obligations of international environmen-
tal agreements on stratospheric ozone
depletion, hazardous wastes, and
endangered species take precedence over
NAFTA obligations, subject to certain
conditions.
Promotion of sustainable develop-
ment is one of the NAFTA's stated
purposes. The NAFTA confirms that
each country may set standards to
achieve the level of environmental
protection it deems appropriate. It
discourages countries from relaxing
environmental standards in order to
attract investment. Important environ-
mental issues not addressed in the
NAFTA itself are being taken up in
parallel and follow-up mechanisms,
which include a pollution control
program for the U.S.-Mexico border, a
North American commission on the
environment, and bilateral environmen-
tal agreements.
A number of options for reconciling
trade and environmental interests are
being studied and tested. The NAFTA
and the parallel and follow-up mecha-
nisms may offer a practical model for
pursuing more open trade in concert
with environmental protection.
UNCTAD is developing case studies on
trade-environment linkages in Brazil,
Colombia, India, the Philippines, and
Turkey and is examining the environ-
mental impact of producing and
processing commodities such as cocoa,
coffee, and rice. The GATT's Working
Group on Environmental Measures and
International Trade is investigating the
trade impacts of environmental
regulations for product packaging and
labeling, an issue of particular concern
to developing countries. An OECD
working group is developing guide-
lines for improving the compatibility of
trade and environmental policies.
An especially promising option is for
countries to conduct environmental
reviews of trade agreements and trade
reviews of environmental agreements as
a standard procedure. Such reviews,
conducted early in the negotiating
process, should help reveal the environ-
mental and economic implications of
these agreements and foster public
comment and debate on the issues that
are revealed.
As to environmental risks from
traded products, it has been suggested
that countries adopt international
environment, health, and safety stan-
dards. However, such standards, where
they exist, may not provide an accept-
able level of protection for countries that
now have stringent domestic standards.
One way to reduce trade barriers posed
by product standards is to expand
international cooperation on product risk
assessment and testing, perhaps using as
a model the OECD's cooperative pro-
gram of investigation on chemicals and
pesticides. This approach might or
might not lead to a larger and more
acceptable set of international environ-
mental standards, but it would make it
easier to distinguish between legitimate
standards and "green" protectionism.
With respect to environmental risks
from production processes, one alterna-
tive to trade restrictions is international
cooperation on environmental labeling of
traded products to reflect their life-cycle
environmental impact, and thus influ-
ence consumer choice. Another option is
to provide training and financial/
technical assistance to exporting coun-
tries to help them change processes that
cause environmental harm. Promotion
of trade in environmentally cleaner
technologies deserves special attention,
as does encouraging multinational
corporations to apply their home country
standards (if they are more stringent) to
their operations in developing countries.
As mentioned earlier, these options may
work best if trade restrictions are
available as a backup.
Finally, countries of the North and
South could take concrete steps "to
promote the intemalization of environ-
mental costs" in the prices of traded
products, in keeping with Principle 16
of the Rio Declaration. Progress
toward this goal would be a useful
measure of the extent to which ex-
panded trade contributes to sustainable
development. •
Additio i ml in forma tion:
On the policy intersect between trade and
environment, EPA's National Advisory
Council for Environmental Policy and
Technology (NACEPT) has published The
Greening of World Trade (March 1993), a
240-page report representing work carried
out by the advison/ group over a tivo-year
period. It provides an overview of the policy
issue through 12 in-depth technical support-
ing papers and recommendations of the
Committee to EPA. Copies are available for
sale for $14.00 from the Government
Printing Office, Superintendent of Docu-
ments, 'Washington, DC 20402, GPO Order
#055-000-00425-1; (202) 783-3238.
EPA JOURNAL
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Stopping the Waste
Technology itself is not the problem
by William A. Nitze
he goal of sustainable develop-
ment is to pass on to future
generations a stock of environ-
mental amenities (clean air, dean water,
top soil, natural ecosystems) at least as
good as the stock we now have. To have
any Rope of achieving that goal, we must
reduce the amount of pollution and
resource depletion per unit of income at
a rate sufficient to offset future growth in
world population and in percapita
income. World population growth will
probably decline only gradually from its
current level of 1.7 percent per year.
Average world per capita income should
grow by at least 2 percent per year if we
are to make progress in reducing poverty
and the gap between rich and poor.
Therefore, we will have to reduce the
average amount of pollution and natural
resource depletion per unit of income by
3.5 to 4 percent per year.
This rate of improvement is daunting;
it is greater than that achieved by the
United States; Japan, or any other
country in the past. It is potentially
achievable in the future, however, for
three reasons.
First, rapid technology development
is enabling us to decouple economic
growth from pollution and natural
resource depletion. In the energy sector,
for example, the United States and other
Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) countries
achieved substantial economic growth
during the high energy price years of
1973 to 1986, with little if any growth in
primary energy consumption. Renewed
incentives for greater efficiency and
(Nitze is President of the Alliance to Save
Energy.)
further development of renewables and
other less polluting energy sources give
us the potential rapidly to reduce energy-
related pollution per unit of income in
rich and poor countries alike.
Second, much of the pollution and
natural resource depletion associated
with current economic activity around
the world results from wasteful technolo-
gies and practices that could be corrected
cost effectively using currently available
technologies. China has been reducing
its energy intensity of production by 3
percent per year since the mid-1980s
through price reform and investment in
co-generation and other energy efficient
technologies. Brazil has reduced its
deforestation rate by eliminating certain
subsidies for clearing land in the Ama-
zon. Russia has an almost limitless
inventory of energy conservation,
pollution prevention, and industrial
modernization projects with high rates of
return and short paybacks.
Third, the richer industrialized
countries are already moving in the
direction of more service-oriented, less
resource- and pollution-intensive
economies, and a number of developing
countries are beginning to follow.
Information processing and telecommu-
nications are inherently less polluting
and resource intensive than steel or
paper manufacturing; pharmaceuticals
use fewer resources and produce less
pollution per unit of value added than
basic chemicals. In this respect, the
differences between the economic
structures of the OECD countries and
those of the more prosperous segments
of developing countries such as Brazil,
China, India, and Mexico are already
narrowing.
These trends must be accelerated,
however, if we are to achieve the
necessary rate of improvement in the
ratio of pollution and natural resource
depletion per unit of income necessary
for sustainable development. This
acceleration will in turn require much
more rapid dispersion of less polluting
and resource intensive technologies
among and within countries. The
operative term here is technology
cooperation, which may be defined as
the combination of actions required to
achieve this dispersion. Before discuss-
ing these actions, it is important to
address two possible misconceptions
about technology cooperation.
First, technology cooperation might
be considered as primarily concerned
with technology. It is not. The keys to
technology cooperation lie in human
education, motivation, and organization
and in access to financial resources, not
in technologies themselves. If the city,
company, association, or other group of
people directly involved in using
technologies to achieve their objectives
are properly educated, motivated, and
organized and have access to capital,
they will be able to get their hands on the
technologies required.
To make this happen, information,
decision-making power, and access to
financial resources must be pushed as far
down into the system as possible. We
will have to find ways to spread the
more horizontal, participatory, team-
oriented, and fluid management struc-
tures being adopted by many successful
corporations to governments, nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs), and
other institutions around the world.
The second misperception is that
APRIL-JUNE 1993
31
-------
/4n Ethiopian woman waters
trees planted to form a
windbreak as part of a land
conservation and irrigation
project. The challenge is to
make the right low- or high-
technology solution available
where it is needed.
technology cooperation is primarily a
North-South or West-East process. This
is true in only one limited respect. The
improvements in education, motivation,
and organization suggested above will
require some initial "pump-priming"
investments by the OECD countries, the
World Bank, the Global Environment
Facility, and other development institu-
tions. Otherwise it is untrue. Many of
the technologies and methods that must
be dispersed already exist or are being
developed in the South. Most of the
financial resources required will have to
be generated internally.
Many OECD countries face a chal-
lenge in internal technology dispersion
similar to that faced by the developing
and Eastern European countries. West-
ern governmental and nongovernmental
organizations have almost as much work
to do in organi/ing for change as their
developing country or Eastern European
counterparts. The successful "Waste
Reduction Always Pays" program
developed in Dow U.S.A.'s Louisiana
Division has still not been adopted by the
Texas Division; the United States and
Western Europe are experiencing the
same political resistance to internalizing
pollution and resource-depletion costs
through subsidy elimination, taxes, and
fees as the developing countries.
Based on the above discussion, there
are four critical elements in a successful
technology cooperation strategy:
We must act as
laboratories in
discovering what
does and does not
work.
• Start at Home. The United States and
other OECD countries will have little
credibility in helping developing or
Eastern European countries deploy
environmentally sustainable technolo-
gies and methods if we are unwilling or
unable to adopt them at home. If OECD
governments do not develop more
effective means of "taming the automo-
bile" through alternative fuels, green
cars, improved public transportation,
congestion pricing, and land-use plan-
ning changes, developing countries are
unlikely to do so.
Similarly, if OECD companies do not
develop and implement comprehensive
"eco-efficiency" programs and extend
those programs to their overseas affili-
ates, companies in non-OECD countries
are unlikely to make the necessary
changes in their own management
procedures. We must act as laboratories
in discovering what does and does not
work. When experiments such as
demand-side management—utilities'
consideration of energy efficiency as a
resource to be evaluated equally with
traditional energy supply options—or
EPA's green programs are successful, we
should promote their spread to other
countries.
• Get the Market Signals Right. The
most powerful catalyst for deployment
of environmentally sustainable technolo-
gies is market signals. When oil prices
were high in the late 1970s and early
1980s, people invested in energy effi-
ciency. When oil prices collapsed in
1986, that investment slacked off. In
countries where strict environmental
regulations make the discharge of toxic
chemicals into the environment expen-
sive, polluters invest significant re-
EPA JOURNAL
-------
sources in pollution prevention and
waste minimization. In countries where
those regulations do not exist or are not
enforced, that investment is small or
nonexistent. Once again the United
States and other OECD countries must
take the lead if we expect governments
of developing countries to overcome
political resistance to internalizing the
costs of pollution and resource depletion
in their own countries.
• Focus on Infrastructure Development.
The history of development assistance
since 1945 suggests that donor govern-
ments and international development
institutions are not necessarily very
good at picking specific technologies,
but can be effective in helping build the
local infrastructures needed to develop
and deploy those technologies. An
outstanding historical example is the
Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which
helped spread the green revolution
throughout the developing world and
led to the creation of the International
Rice Research Institute and other
institutions doing research on sustain-
able agriculture. CGIAR is serving as a
model for the Global Change System for
Analysis, Research, and Training
(START), which proposes to create a
network of centers for global change
research and training throughout the
developing world. Both of these
initiatives were created by NGOs and
only later supported by governments,
suggesting that governments should rely
heavily on the private sector in building
the infrastructure required.
• Create Financial Leverage. Financing
is one of the most critical elements in
technology cooperation. Fortunately for
overstretched OECD budgets, the
constraint on financing technology
transfer is not availability of money per
se. Public and private investors in Asia,
Latin America, and Eastern Europe are
already budgeting hundreds of billions
of dollars on energy and other develop-
ment projects. The World Bank and
other development institutions have tens
of billions of uncommitted project funds.
There are large pools of private capital
available for investment in the develop
ing world and Eastern Europe. The real
constraint is a shortage of well designed
and managed projects that combine
environmental sustainability, high rates
"I'm begin fling to think I need a thrte-million-year sabbatical
from humankind to recover my health."
Drawing by Dedini; copyright 1992, The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
of return, and acceptable levels of legal
and political risk. In the case of renew-
able energy, agricultural, and other
small-scale local projects, there is also a
need for intermediaries that can aggre-
gate a number of projects into a package
sufficiently large to attract funds from
larger institutions.
Multilateral and bilateral funding
sources should use their limited funds to
provide an incentive for creating those
conditions. The Alliance to Save Energy
is starting work on a sustainable cities
project, supported by the Agency for
International Development, that will
attempt to develop collaborative electric-
ity sector projects in several large
developing country or Eastern European
cities. A collaborative including local
government, the local electricity sup-
plier, local and foreign NGOs, and local
and foreign companies would jointly
develop an integrated resource plan for
meeting the city's future electricity needs.
As opposed to relying solely on the
construction of more power plants at the
lowest possible first cost, this plan would
incorporate supply- and demand-side
options based on their net full-cycle costs
after reflecting environmental impacts.
As the plan evolved, it would induce
reform of local electricity pricing
practices and other innovations.
The good news is that we already
have available the technologies, manage-
ment techniques, and successful models
to substantially reduce pollution and
natural resources depletion around the
world. The bad news is that we are a
long way from developing the human
infrastructure, incentives, and institu-
tional arrangements necessary to speed
up the deployment of those technologies
and techniques. Therefore, the key to a
successful technology cooperation
strategy is to focus our limited resources
on building that infrastructure, creating
those incentives, and developing those
arrangements. •
APRIL-JUNE 1993
33
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Building Coalitions
Africa 2000 offers a model of cooperation
by Linda Starke
People attending the Earth
Summit in June 1992 discussed
repeatedly the need to build new
coalitions as we work toward sustainable
development—coalitions, for example,
that include the expertise of environmen-
tal groups, business, government,
academia, and labor unions. While the
Rio delegates were talking, the vital
work of coalition building was going on
in many parts of the world. The Africa
2000 Network is one good example.
Africa 2000 grew out of a June 1986
proposal to support small, community-
based initiatives that was made by the
Canadian government at the U.N.
Special Session on Africa. The Trust
Fund for $25 million that was subse-
quently established has received
contributions so far totaling $17 million
from the governments of Canada,
Denmark, France, Japan, and Norway;
it is administered by the U.N. Develop-
ment Program (UNDP) in New York.
The network was not set up to create
new groups to do development work;
rather, it supports the activities of
existing grassroots groups and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs).
Between 1989 and the end of 1992, grants
totaling more than $14 million had been
given to over 400 projects in natural
forest management, erosion control,
water harvesting, range management,
watershed management, food preserva-
tion and storage, and a host of other
(Starke is a Washington-based freelance
writer and editor on international environ-
mental issues.)
areas. Each grant is for less than $50,000.
The innovative aspect of this network
is its use of national selection committees
in each of the 12 countries it operates in
to date (Burkina Faso, Burundi,
Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho,
Mauritania, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania,
Uganda, and Zimbabwe). These groups
bring together individuals from various
government agencies, universities,
research institutes, U.N. agencies
working in the country, and national and
regional NGOs. In many cases, the
national selection committees provide
the only opportunity these people have
to work together on their country's
pressing environment and development
issues. And the members take away
from the meetings an appreciation of the
importance of building coalitions.
In each of the 12 countries, a full-time
national coordinator appointed by
UNDP administers the program. He or
she responds to requests from local
community groups and national NGOs
for small grants for projects that both
preserve the environment and promote
development. The coordinator visits the
project site, checking in particular to
ensure that the people who are supposed
to benefit from the project are involved
in its design and execution. Issues to be
discussed with the community include
the source of water for any agricultural
project, the land to be used, who is going
to do the actual work, how success of the
project is going to be measured, and the
role of any NGO from outside the
community that might be involved with
the project.
Project applications and the
coordinator's field trip notes are re-
viewed by the national selection commit-
tee at regular meetings, sometimes as
often as every other month. UNDP in
New York provides a set amount to each
country every three months, based on
recent grants and the coordinator's
assessment of need, and it is up to the
committee to approve grant applications
and decide how much money to award.
Africa 2000's evolution during its first
four years more or less parallels the
international community's growing
understanding of how environmental
and economic problems and solutions
are inextricably linked. Projects were
initially rather narrowly focused, with
almost all of them involving tree plant-
ing in an effort to ease fuelwood short-
ages. One of the first country programs
to be up and running, for example, was
Ghana's. In 1989 and 1990,28 out of the
35 projects funded were for afforestation
or agroforestry, with grants ranging from
$1,077 to $22,298 (which went to Friends
of the Earth in Ghana for work with 25
communities).
National coordinators and selection
committees quickly learned, however,
that treating in isolation one aspect of
communities' environmental problems
was a recipe for failure. If people in a
community who are struggling to make
ends meet see no immediate benefit of
tree planting, they are unlikely to help
protect and nourish trees that have been
planted. This is the basic lesson the
world has learned in the last decade: For
development to be sustainable, it must
meet as many people's needs as possible.
In Africa, this means projects have to
34
EPA JOURNAL
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include income-generating activities, for
helping people raise their standard of
living through higher incomes is a must.
One example of this more holistic
approach is found in an Africa 2000
project in Rubuyenge, Rwanda. The
communities' immediate problem was
reduced availability of food, which led
local women to think about cultivating
marshlands in the area as other cropland
became scarce and as food aid dimin-
ished. They sought help through a local
NGO, which received a grant of $18,758
from the network.
These funds were used to drain
selected marshlands so that fruit and
fuelwood trees could be planted, to
translate agricultural guidelines into
local languages, and to start a pig-
breeding project. This has helped raise
incomes in the area, and now the women
are considering starting fish-farming and
duck-rearing projects.
Similarly, the Chandarema Women's
Group in the North Maragoli area of
western Kenya has received help from
Africa 2000. This local group has been
working together on small retail
businesses in maize, chicken, fish, and
bananas since 1977. They received
$17,844 from the network in 1991 for a
cattle-keeping and conservation project.
The members—24 women and eight
men—learned not only bookkeeping
skills but also fodder management, the
proper way to raise calves, the prepara-
tion of liquid manure from cow dung,
and organic farming. Sweet potato vines
and banana trees were planted along
with fodder trees for the cattle, so that
the land was used as productively as
possible. As in Rwanda, the project
addressed several of the community's
needs at once, increasing its chances of
success.
These two projects illustrate the
important role accorded to women in the
Africa 2000 Network. Their involvement
in the network is crucial because women
have primary responsibility for provid-
ing household food throughout the
continent. Yet everyone involved agrees
that there is still considerable room for
improvement in this area. Women are
increasingly active in the daily work of
network projects, but they are less
involved at the decision-making level in
communities and the NGOs that serve
them. Women's voices are certainly
heard among the national coordinators
(half of whom are women), in the
national selection committees, and on an
advisory group that works with UNDP
on the overall program. But this is less
true at the local level, and further efforts
are needed to open opportunities for
women to suggest, design, and manage
grassroots programs.
Another possible area for improve-
ment lies in broadening the network's
admirable scope of community participa-
tion even further. The only sector of
society not included on any selection
committees is business, yet the expertise
of a local industrialist or a member of the
chamber of commerce could surely be
helpful as committees consider the
feasibility of proposed projects, espe-
cially given the network's emphasis on
income-generation projects. Neverthe-
less, as a UNDP review found, "the
composition of the committees has
contributed to the development of a
spirit of partnership and dialogue among
the various categories of entities in-
volved in the network."
The Africa 2000 Network is a good
illustration of how those lofty concepts
heard so often in Rio can work in the real
world. •
Facing food shortages, these Rwanda women sought financial aid from Africa 2000 to cultivate fruit and fuelwood trees
and other crops in a former marshland.
APRIL-JUNE 1993
35
-------
n the U.S. Interest
A focus on the environment is crucial for
America's future national security
by Gareth Porter
n the post-Cold War era, environ-
mental security should be recog-
nized as one of the pillars of U.S.
national security, along with military
and economic security. The environmen-
tal security of the American people-
defined in terms of reducing threats from
global environmental deterioration-
should be integrated more fully into U.S.
global policy. Mounting stresses being
placed on the Earth's life support
systems threaten the well-being of
Americans in a number of ways:
«Increases in global tempera hire
expected in the next few decades from
increased concentrations of heat-trapping
gases in the atmosphere could raise sea
levels, causing saltwater intrusion into
U.S. water supplies. Global warming
could also cause the Midwest to suffer
scorching droughts on a regular basis.
• We are confronted with the potential
loss of a significant proportion of the
world's biological species and a threat to
the security of the world food supply
from its dependence on relatively few
varieties of food crops that are vulner-
able to diseases and pests that have
developed resistance to pesticides.
• The depletion of the ozone layer
increases exposure to ultraviolet radia-
tion, which can weaken the human
immune system, damage both food crops
and the phytoplankton upon which all
marine life ultimately depends, and
dramatically increase skin cancers.
The erosion of the environmental
security of other countries also affects
other U.S. global security, economic, and
(Porter is International Program Director
of the Environmental and Energy Study
Institute.)
humanitarian interests. The capability of
the developing world to produce enough
food to feed its population is imperilled
by the combination of high population-
growth rates and the loss of soil nutrients
and soil erosion, which could reduce
global food production by as much as 20
to 30 percent within two decades if it is
not slowed. Such a global food crisis
could create humanitarian crises and
political chaos in many more countries.
Deforestation and soil erosion will
continue to swell the tide of illegal
Mexican immigration into the United
States. And wars could break out in the
Middle East and elsewhere as a result of
conflicts over dwindling water supplies.
The developing countries are crucial
to reducing global environmental threats
in part because, by early hi the next
century, they are expected to account for
more of the greenhouse gas emissions
than the industrialized countries and
because they hold 90 percent of the
Earth's biological diversity and will be
the locus of most of its loss in future
decades. Over 90 percent of the world's
population growth, moreover, will take
place in the developing world. There-
fore, supporting sustainable develop-
ment paths in these countries must be an
integral element of a U.S. environmental
security strategy.
U.S. policies toward developing
countries should be explicitly oriented
toward the goal of North-South partner-
ships for sustainable development. The
United States should offer, in concert
with other industrialized countries, to
reduce inequities in trade and financial
relations and to provide appropriate
financial and technical assistance to
developing countries in return for their
commitments to more sustainable
development policies and participation
in global efforts to reduce environmental
threats.
A strategy for North-South environ-
mental security cooperation should
include the following elements:
• Reorientation of U.S. bilateral environ-
mental assistance to sustainable develop-
ment
• The reform of multilateral financial
institutions
• New initiatives in U.S. debt and trade
policies
• U.S. leadership in making global
environmental agreements effective
Most foreign policy professionals and
members of Congress continue to think
of any foreign assistance that does not
serve U.S. short-term political-military or
economic interests as "international
welfare." Not so. U.S. overseas develop-
ment assistance (ODA) policy should be
based on the premise that it serves the
mutual interest of both parties in global
environmental security. Developing
countries need greater capacity to
implement natural resources manage-
ment plans and programs to reduce the
stresses on their natural resources related
to poverty and powerlessness. U.S.
development assistance should focus
increasingly on these sustainable
development objectives. And the United
States, which is now next to last among
donor countries in percentage of gross
national product devoted to ODA,
should commit itself to the target of
doubling the amount of its assistance by
the year 2000 if recipient countries
demonstrate serious commitment to
sustainable development goals.
Making the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) more
36
EPA JOURNAL
-------
responsive to the needs of sustainable
development is the most important
means of altering global development
patterns. The World Bank has ignored
the potential of integrated resource
planning (IRP) to maximize energy
efficiency in developing countries, and
too little of the Bank's lending—includ-
ing lending by its International Develop-
ment Association arm for the least
developed countries—goes explicitly for
poverty alleviation. The United States
should press for a new World Bank
policy for sector lending in energy,
power, and transportation that has as its
ultimate goal basing all loans for these
sectors on long-term national plans that
employ least-cost, demand-side plan-
ning. And the United States should
support a global goal of 50 percent of all
project lending going for poverty
alleviation beginning in fiscal year 1995.
Few would question the need for
economic stabilization and reform in
heavily indebted countries, but the
narrow, short-term perspective of the
IMF's conditions for structural adjust-
ment sometimes conflicts with the needs
of environmental sustainability. While
some IMF conditions, such as reducing
agricultural input and energy subsidies,
are clearly supportive of sustainable
development, others—such as exchange
rate devaluation and import liberaliza-
tion—may or may not promote environ-
mental sustainability, depending on the
circumstances. The environmental
security of the United States will not be
protected if developing countries are
able to service their debts but continue to
destroy their natural assets in the
process. The United States should call
for the IMF to develop the expertise on
social and environmental issues needed
to analyze the linkages between adjust-
ment policies, poverty, and environmen-
tal degradation. It should seek an IMF
mandate to adopt explicit poverty
alleviation and human resource develop-
ment goals as conditions for loans.
U.S. policies toward North-South
trade and financial relations should
reflect their impacts on the ability and
willingness of developing countries to
manage their natural resources
sustainably. A sharp decline in com-
modity prices (46 percent for a weighted
index of 33 primary product exports),
heavy debt burdens, and industrialized
Hunger in Somalia. Unless current trends in population growth and natural resource
depletion are reversed, the world may see more famines like those that have swept
through Somalia and Ethiopia.
country protectionism (which alone cost
developing countries the equivalent of 3
percent of their collective gross national
product each year) have deprived
developing countries of large amounts of
income. These inequities in North-South
trade tend to force developing countries
to export more of their natural resources
in order to maintain the same level of
imports. They create a powerful incen-
tive for these countries to cut down more
forests and convert more larkJ from
subsistence agriculture to export crops,
often pushing farmers into forests and
marginal lands.
The United States should insist that
the GATT Uruguay Round not only
dismantle most barriers to developing
country exports but also eliminate the
practice of increasing the tariffs on
processed goods in direct proportion to
the degree of processing. And the United
States should support the "Trinidad
Terms" for bilateral debt reduction for
the poorest countries by the Paris Club of
creditor nations—reducing the debtor
country's debt by two-thirds and
rescheduling the remaining one-third
according to the country's ability to pay.
The ultimate goal of U.S. policy, how-
ever, should be complete forgiveness of
the bilateral debt of those heavily
indebted, low-income countries that
would still have unsustainable debts
even after the enactment of the Trinidad
Terms.
If the climate and biodiversity
conventions are to be effective in
APRIL-JUNE 1993
-------
reducing the threats of global wanning
and biodiversity loss, key developing
countries will have to be persuaded to
make significant commitments to
limiting greenhouse gas emissions and to
conserving biological resources, based on
a series of unprecedented North-South
bargains. Instead of counting on multi-
lateral conference diplomacy to arrive at
such bargains, the United States should
take the lead in reaching substantive
understandings with these major
developing countries. Working groups
should be organized by the National
Security Council staff to develop detailed
proposals for ultimate presentation to
the key developing countries. These
proposals, based on consultations with
the relevant agencies of the developing
country and with other donor countries,
must offer significant benefits to the
country in return for agreement to
specific actions to enhance global
environmental security.
In the case of the climate change
convention, for example, any agreement
by industrialized countries to reduce or
even stabilize greenhouse gas emissions
will be nullified by the growth of
Chinese emissions over the next 30 years
unless China agrees to a major effort to
control its emissions. There is scope for a
win-win solution to the problem,
however, because of the extreme energy
inefficiency of the Chinese economy.
China might agree to adopt a national
plan for holding its emissions to an
agreed-upon level if the industrialized
countries pledge a major new program of
loans for the purchase of energy efficient
coal conversion and industrial technolo-
gies. To convince skeptical Chinese
officials that such a bargain is in China's
interests, however, a final proposal
would have to include the results of a
detailed feasibility study, carried out
with the participation of Chinese energy
experts and financed by the industrial-
ized countries. •
About Our Contributors
Dear EPA Journal:
1 have been struggling to inform myself about recycling and related environmental
matters. I recently discovered the EPA Region 1 Library, the best I have found yet.
i enjoyed reading your July/August 1992 issue on recycling. However, I am very
frustrated that you do not publish mailing addresses for the authors and organizations
mentioned. I have wasted a great deal of time trying to locate this information!
Keith K. Davison
239 Clinton Road
Brookline, MA 02146
Thank you for the good idea. From now on, EPA Journal will publish information about how to
tvntiict our contributors:
SirShridith Ramphal
World Conservation Union
Rue Mauverney 28
Ch-1196 Gland
Switzerland
Phone:4122999-0001
FAX: 41 22 999-0002
Kathy Sessions
U.N. Association of the U.S.A.
1010 Vermont Ave. NW., Suite 904
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: 202/347-5004
Fax: 202/628-5945
Carrie Meyer
World Resources Institute
1709 New York Ave. NW.
Washington, DC 20006
Phone: 202/662-2592
Fax: 202/6384X136
Mohamed El-Ashry
World Bank—Environment Department
1818 H Street NW., Room S5055
Washington, DC 20433
Phone: 202/473-3471
Fax: 202/477-0565
Korinna Horta
Environmental Defense Fund
1875 Connecticut Ave. NW., Suite 1016
Washington, DC 20009
Phone: 202/387-3500; X25
Fax: 202/234-6049
Paul Cough
U.S. EPA (A-106)
Office of International Activities
401 M Street SW.
Washington, DC 20460
Phone: 202/260-8975
Fax: 202/260-4470
William Nitze
The Alliance to Save Energy
1725 K Street NW., Suite 509
Washington, DC 20006
Phone: 202/857-0666
Fax: 202/331-9588
Linda Starke
1789 Lanier Place NW., Suite 43
Washington, DC 20009
Phone and fax: 202/387-4238
Gareth Porter
Environmental and Energy
Study Institute
122 C Street NWV Suite 700
Washington, DC 20001
Phone: 202/628-1400
Fax: 202/628-1825
EPA JOURNAL
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HABITAT
O THE PEOPLE of Namibia, living with
little rainfall is a fact of life. The nation, on
the southwest coast of Africa, has the driest
climate on the continent and, in 1992, suffered
•ugh its worst drought in a quarter of a century.
W. Luckmann, a Namibian poet and teacher,
writes that the following poem "was inspired one day
when, during our school holidays, 1 was driving to
the coast and saw how numerous cattle were led by
herdsmen along the road. Apparently, that was the
only grazing left on some drought-stricken farms. As I
teach a lot of farmers' children, my mind couldn't
help turning back to many hot days when we dis-
cussed poems about rain."
Children Yearn for Rain
The sun smears itself again
across dusty classroom panes
and the many looks of children
crowd open and droughty doorways.
Their books huddle them in bondage
but their minds cannot hold or sort the written word.
The teacher scans another poem
from his book-colored hoard
His words only border and skirt
minds drawn back home:
to cattle that silently tread
along sparse roadside curbs;
to fathers that ponder
how a drought can hold quiet title
to their land;
to seasons that come as they go,
leaving dry imprints on family land.
Today's poem describes:
the hissing soles of motor-cars
the sliding, skipping of schoolboys' shoes
the first rains
that pat the tops of flowers like children's heads
And the children ,
like backward seedlings yearn for rain
to turn with thrusting fingers
the dusty pages of another summer season.
—W. Luckmann
(The writings of Luckmann ami other
Southern African writers are featured
in The Kalahari Review, 4000
Cathedral Ave., NW, #13£B,
Washington, DC 20026.,)
APRIL-JUNE 1993
-------
FOR THE CLASSROOM
Hold Your Own Earth Summit
o
NLY ABOUT HALF of the mature forests that once
graced the tropical regions of Earth still stand. The
forests that remain, which are mostly in the Amazon
Basin, continue to be destroyed at a quick pace. Consider these facts
about the rainforest:
Forty million acres of tropical rainforest (about the size of the state
of Washington) are being cut and cleared every year.
• 90 different Amazonian tribes are thought to have disappeared this
century as their habitat and livelihood have been destroyed.
• 90 percent of all primates are found only in tropical forest regions
of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
• 700 tree species (the equivalent of the total species found in Canada
and the continental United States) were found in 10 one-hectare
plots in Borneo.
• Less than 1 percent of 250,000 known tropical rainforest plants
have been screened for use in life-saving drugs.
When the countries of the world got together for the United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the "Earth
Summit") in June 1992, destruction of the tropical—and temperate—
forests was one of the delegates' great concerns. After much dis-
agreement and negotiation, the nations agreed on non-binding
principles for the management, conservation, and sustainable
development of all types of forests. By holding your own Earth
Summit, you and your classmates can decide what the world should
do about the rapid decrease in the world's forests.
According to the 1993 Information Please Environmental Almanac,
the Earth Summit discussion on the forest principles centered on
disagreements between the developed world and the developing
countries. The developing countries argued that they alone should
determine how their forests are used. Therefore, they said, their
forests cannot be controlled by an international treaty. They pointed
out that developed nations long ago cut down many of their forests
to enrich themselves. They argued that the developing world has the
right to do the same with its forests, if it so chooses. The final
agreement largely reflects this position of the developing world.
1. DIVIDE INTO GROUPS.
Each group will represent
one of the following:
• Brazil
• Japan
• Indonesia
• Niger
• The United States
• Student moderators, to
guide the debate
2. RESEARCH the issue of
deforestation and find
background information
about your country. The
following questions should
guide your research:
• Why is deforestation
occurring? What are some
alternatives to destroying the
forests that also consider the
needs of people? How can
we save forests for the
future?
• Does your country have
many forest resources? Have
your forests been used to
make wealth for your
country? Will future genera-
tions be affected by how
quickly you are cutting your
forests now?
• Does your country have
financial wealth compared to
the other countries involved
in your Earth Summit? Does
your country consume a lot
of natural resources com-
pared to the other countries?
• How might your country
benefit from other countries'
practicing sustainable
development, or using their
resources wisely?
• Who should pay for
international efforts to save
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the forests? Can your
country afford to contribute
much toward worldwide
sustainable development
efforts? Should the money
that all the countries contrib-
ute go into a fund controlled
equally by everyone, despite
how much each individual
country pays? Or should the
countries that pay the most
have the most control over
how the funds are spent?
• Should each country have
the right to decide on its own
how to use its rainforest
resources? Why or why not?
Note: Moderators should
focus their research on
deforestation and identify
potential solutions to slow it.
3. WRITE A SHORT
PROPOSAL to debate at
your Earth Summit. Write
about: What should the
world do to work toward
conserving forest resources?
Who should pay for those
efforts? What should your
country do?
Your proposal should
benefit your country eco-
nomically and protect your
country's forests. However,
keep in mind that the
proposal should help all
other countries work toward
conserving the world's
resources.
4. HOLD YOUR EARTH
SUMMIT. Moderators
should review the finished
proposals before the Earth
Summit, listing questions to
ask the presenters and
identifying differences and
potential areas of compro-
mise within the proposals.
A representative from
each country should have
five minutes to present her
or his group's proposal.
Moderators and representa-
tives from the other coun-
tries should have the
opportunity to ask questions
after each presentation.
Moderators should then
consider the proposals and
their own research, and
come up with a compromise
proposal. The compromise
should be presented to the
other students for their
reaction and debate. Stu-
dents should debate in the
spirit of compromise and
with the understanding that
some agreement is necessary
to conserve the world's
forests.
Extensions:
1. Organize an environmen-
tal "Town Summit" for your
community. Develop a list of
environmental concerns you
have about your community.
Then list the diverse groups
within your community,
such as businesses and
minority groups, that might
have different perspectives
on your concerns. Actual
representatives from the
community should be
contacted for their views and
perhaps invited to the Town
Summit.
2. Organize an environmen-
tal "School Summit" or
"School District Summit."
Identify which environmen-
tal issues are most important
to your fellow students and
then hold the Summit to
decide what to do to im-
prove the environment
around your school. Ex-
amples: Study which
hazardous substances are
used in your school and
investigate whether there are
alternatives to those sub-
stances. Or examine your
school's waste stream and
identify ways to reduce it.
Prepare a checklist for your
local school board highlight-
ing the environmental
concerns you have about
your school, or visit a school
board meeting to make your
views known.
Some Sources:
• The 1993 Information Please
Environmental Almanac,
World Resources Institute.
• Atlas of the Environment, G.
Lean, D. Hinrichsen, and A.
Markham. Prentice Hall
Press, 1990.
• Eville Gorham, "An
Ecologist's Guide to the
Problems of the 21st Cen-
tury," The American Biology
Teacher, Vol. 52, No. 8, pp.
480-483, Nov/Dec. 1990.
• Russell E. Train, "A Call for
Sustainability," EPA Journal,
Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 7-10,
Sept./Oct. 1992.
(Teacher Ron Monson
provided valuable input in
developing this lesson plan.
For more ideas on presenting
forestry issues to students,
contact Monson at
Minnehaha Academy, 3107
47th Ave. S., Minneapolis,
MN, 55406.) •
To the Teacher Objec-
tives of this activity are:
1. To examine the issue
of rainforest destruction
and possible efforts to
slow that destruction;
2. To become aware of
the variation in environ-
mental and economic
resources that exists
between various
countries; and 3. To
analyze the different
positions the countries
might take on forestry
issues, to defend or
refute those positions,
then to synthesize new
principles by which
nations can agree to
support sustainable
development efforts.
Teachers should use
discretion in choosing
moderators for this
lesson plan. They
should help moderators
look for areas of agree-
ment among the various
proposals and be
prepared to ask ques-
tions of the presenters.
APRIL-JUNE 1993
41
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ON THE MOVEt
Sussman
Gardiner
Herman
Robert M. Sussman is EFA's
new Deputy Administrator.
He is an expert in federal
environmental law, with
nationally recognized
expertise in the Toxic
Substances Control Act
(TSCA) and other statutes
that EPA administers. He
was the principal drafter of
two regulations under TSCA
that developed from negotia-
tions between environmental
groups, EPA, and the
chemical industry.
Sussman's experience
includes extensive litigation
in the federal courts. He has
argued two cases before the
Supreme Court and has
appeared before nearly all of
the U.S. Courts of Appeals.
Sussman comes to EPA
from the law firm of Latham
and Watkins, where he has
been a partner since 1987.
There he established an
environmental group that
grew to include 10 attorneys.
Previously he was an
attorney with the Washing-
ton, DC, law firm of
Covington and Burling; he
joined the firm in 1974 and
became a partner in 1981.
From 1973 to 1974, he was a
law clerk to the Honorable
Walter K. Stapleton, a U.S.
District Judge for the District
of Delaware.
The new Deputy Admin-
istrator is the author of
several articles concerning
the activities of EPA, the
Consumer Product Safety
Commission, the Occupa-
tional Safety and Health
Administration, and the
Food and Drug Administra-
tion. He is currently co-
authoring a book for the
Environmental Law Institute
on TSCA and the Federal
Insecticide, Fungicide, and
Rodenticide Act.
Sussman earned a B.A.
degree in English from Yale
University, graduating
magna cum laude in 1969. In
1973, he graduated from
Yale Law School, where he
was editor of the school's
law journal.
David Gardiner has been
named Assistant Adminis-
trator for Policy, Planning
and Evaluation.
Gardiner was Legislative
Director of the Sierra Club
since 1983. In that position,
he directed all of the Sierra
Club's lobbying in Washing-
ton, DC, on legislative and
administrative matters.
These involved air and water
pollution, toxic waste
cleanup, wilderness and the
protection of public lands,
global warming and energy
policy, and international
environmental issues.
Besides managing the Sierra
Club's Political Litigation
and Media programs,
Gardiner directed policy and
strategy development,
communications, and
research.
In 1981, Gardiner was the
Sierra Club's Washington
Representative. He directed
the congressional lobbying
campaign on the Clean Air
Act and acid rain. From
1978 until 1981, he served as
Clean Air Coordinator of the
Sierra Club, where he
directed a nationwide effort
to educate citizens about the
Clean Air Act and encourage
participation in the states'
clean air planning process.
He has been a board
member for the League of
Conservation Voters since
1989. There he endorsed
senatorial and congressional
candidates, established the
league's substantive agenda,
and developed the league's
annual Environmental
Scorecard.
He graduated from
Harvard College with a B.A.
degree in History in 1977.
Steven A. Herman has been
appointed Assistant Admin-
istrator for Enforcement, a
position in which he acts as
primary advisor to the
Administrator on criminal
and civil enforcement
activities.
Herman previously
served, from 1984 until his
recent EPA appointment, as
Assistant Section Chief of
General Litigation in the
Environmental and Natural
Resources Division at the
Department of Justice. There
he supervised complex and
often controversial environ-
mental litigation while
representing the government
in environmental and
natural resource cases
arising from federal statutes
and the Constitution.
From 1979 to 1984 as
team leader of the General
Litigation Section, he
supervised lawyers conduct-
ing environmental and Fifth
Amendment takings cases.
Before that he served as a
trial attorney for the section
(1978-1979).
As Staff Counsel for the
Criminal Appeals Bureau of
the New York City Legal Aid
Society, he briefed and
argued criminal appellate
cases. From 1972 to 1976 he
was Staff Counsel for the
society's Prisoner's Rights
Project and responsible for
federal constitutional
litigation over conditions in
state and local prisons and
jails.
Herman also worked as
counsel at the Pulaski
County, Little Rock, Arkan-
sas, Legal Aid Bureau (1970
to 1972), where he counseled
community groups and
government officials on
school problems, welfare,
and public housing policies.
He received his B.A.
degree from Rutgers Univer-
sity in 1966 and a J.D. degree
from Rutgers Law School in
1969.
Robert W. Hickmott has
been appointed as the new
Associate Administrator for
the Office of Congressional
and Legislative Affairs. In
this position he serves as the
42
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Hickmott
Ucelli
Lotis
principal advisor to the
Administrator on all con-
gressional and legislative
activities.
Before joining EPA,
Hickmott was Deputy
Executive Director for the
Democratic Senatorial
Campaign. From 1989 to
1991 he was an Associate
with the law firm of
Skadden, Arps, Slate
Meagher and Flom. From
1987 to 1989, Hickmott was
Chief of Staff for Senator
Timothy E. Wirth, and from
1985 to 1987 he was National
Finance Director for the
Wirth for Senate Campaign.
He has also held positions
as Political Affairs Director
for the Congoleum Corpora-
tion, 1983 to 1984; Executive
Director, National Business
Council, Democratic Na-
tional Committee, 1980 to
1983; Public Affairs Counsel,
E.I. duPont Company, 1978
to 1981, and Director of the
Alumni/Admissions
Programs of Boston
University's Alumni Affairs
Office, 1976 to 1978.
Hickmott graduated
summa cum laude from
Boston University's School
of Public Communications
with a B.S. in public commu-
nications in 1976. He
received hisJ.D. from
Georgetown University Law
Center in 1988.
Loretta M. Ucelli is the new
Associate Administrator for
the Office of Communica-
tions, Education, and Public
Affairs.
Her background in
communications includes
managing communications
and media relations for the
National Abortion Rights
Action League (NARAD
where she served as Director
of Communications from
1989 to 1992. At NARAL, she
developed substantive
message strategy, supervised
press operations, served as
spokesperson, and imple-
mented a national communi-
cations plan and message
strategy through the national
media and state-level
grassroots affiliates.
In 1988, she worked as
coordinator of special events
for the Dukakis/Bentsen
Campaign, de\rising and
managing media arrange-
ments for the presidential
and vice-presidential debates
and town meetings.
Before that, Ucelli was
Vice President of Public
Affairs and Communications
for the National Association
of Broadcasters (1986 to
1988). At NAB, she directed
the daily internal and
external communications for
the association, which
represents 940 television and
5,000 radio stations, includ-
ing all the major networks.
As Director of Communi-
cations (1981 to 1986) for the
American Federation of
Government Employees,
AFL-CIO, she promoted
union activities with the
national and local media,
Congress, and the public
while serving as editor-in-
chief of four union publica-
tions. As a member of the
federation's senior manage-
ment team, she established
the union's legislative and
political goals on issues
affecting federal employees.
Other positions held
were: Regional Press Secre-
tary, Mondale/Ferraro
Campaign (1984); Florida
Press Secretary, Carter/
Mondale Campaign (1980);
News Editor, KDKA Radio,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
(1979-1980); and Anchor and
News Director, WCLG
Radio, Morgantown, West
Virginia (1977-1979).
In 1976, she graduated
from West Virginia Univer-
sity with a B.S. degree in
Journalism.
Jon G. Lotis is a new
Administrative Law Judge at
EPA. He comes to this
Agency from the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commis-
sion.
Judge Lotis is a certified
arbitrator on the panel of
commercial arbitrators of the
American Arbitration
Association and also for the
American Association of
Better Business Bureaus. He
also serves as a mediator and
mentor for the District of
Columbia Mediation Service.
He is licensed to practice
before the U.S. District
Court, U.S. Court of Ap-
peals, and U.S. Supreme
Court.
In 1978, Lotis was ap-
pointed Administrative Law
Judge for the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission. He
had responsibility for
supervising all attorneys
engaged in the trial of oil
and gas pipeline rate
proceedings.
In 1973, Lotis was ap-
pointed Assistant General
Counsel for gas pipeline and
electric rates, with responsi-
bility for advising the
Federal Power Commission
on the Natural Gas and
Federal Power Acts as they
related to regulation of rates,
charges, and terms ot service
for interstate gas pipelines
and electric utilities.
From 1968 to 1972, he
served as sole counsel for
major rate cases and super-
vised other proceedings at
the Federal Power Commis-
sion.
I le received a B.A. in
Business Administration
from the University of
Pittsburgh in 1963, and a J.D.
from George Washington
University Law School in
1967. •
APRIL-JUNE 1993
43
-------
CHRONICLEI
Fire on the Cuyahoga
by Teresa Opheim
Blaze on the Cuyahoga, 1969.
Ihe Plain Dealer photo Cleveland. Ohio
The blaze did not last long; the mon-
etary damage was fairly small. Yet
the 1969 fire on Ohio's Cuyahoga
River ignited a public outcry about the state
of the nation's environment and, along with
oil spills and "dying" lakes, led to the
passage of the major environmental legisla-
tion of the early 1970s.
Running through Akron and Cleveland,
Ohio, into Lake Erie, the Cuyahoga had
been polluted for years. In 1881, the mayor
of Cleveland called it "an open sewer
through the center of the city." The river
had burned twice before, in 1936 and 1952,
without much fanfare. But it was the blaze
on June 22,1969, that caught the public's
imagination and led many to think, as one
local mayor said, "My Cod, if this is what
we can do to our water, then there's got to
be a change."
At noon that day, a section of the river
covered with oil and debris, just southeast
of Cleveland, was ignited by an unknown
source. The blaze lasted
slightly more than 20
minutes and caused
$50,000 in damages to
two wooden railroad
bridges.
For Ohioans, the
"spiritual damage," as
one newspaper put it,
was greater. As a result
of news accounts and
jokes about the absurdity
of a river igniting,
images of the fiery water
resonated throughout the
nation. "Tell someone
you're from Cleveland and he'll say:
'Cleveland, eh? Isn't that the place where
the river is so polluted, it's a fire hazard?'"
the Cleveland Plain Dra/er editorialized
days after the fire. "It's a funny line—if you
don't live in Cleveland."
Twenty-four years later, locals have
grown tired of the river's lingering notori-
ety. Said one city booster recently: "How
long do we have to go before we don't
have to continually bring up that there was
a brief fire on a river 20 years ago? ... I
don't read stories about Washington from
Washington that constantly mention this
was the city where Lincoln was shot."
Today, the water quality in the river's
40-mile stretch between Cleveland and
Akron has greatly improved, according to
David Stroud of the Ohio Environmental
Protection Agency. However, the northern
part of the river that serves as a ship
channel is dredged annually, and the
sediments are still contaminated to such an
extent that they must be put into a confined
disposal facility. Oxygen levels are still
very low, and fish that happen into the
section of the river in the Cleveland area
could go belly-up in the summer.
The Cuyahoga River has come a long
way from the sordid state of affairs of 1969.
Today, the banks of the river even run
through a festive area of restaurants and
shops, an example of urban renewal that
experts say is a direct result of improved
water quality. However, it is the
Cuyahoga's misfortune to be a small river
located in the midst of a huge population
base and the industrial and municipal
waste that's produced as a result. As one
state official says, "There will never be a
trout stream flowing through downtown
Cleveland." •
(Opheim if Associate Editor of EPA Journal.
Information included in this article is taken
largely from Cleveland newspaper accounts.)
I"..'. S.P.I . 1993-3i|-2-I38:80002
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Letters
Growing with Garbage
EPA Journal is having a terrific influence
on young people. As an example, my
niece, Roberta Davis, recently completed a
science fair project entitled "Growing with
Garbage." The project was featured in her
local newspaper, the Foster County Indepen-
dent. The idea for the project was taken
from the EPA Journal issue on recycling.
Roberta is 11 years old and just finished
the fifth grade at Carrington Elementary
School in Carrington, N.D. She lives with
her parents and two sisters on a farm.
They raise grains, sunflowers, and live-
stock.
Morris Beaton
Water Quality Branch
EPA Region 5
Watch that Exponent
The inset entitled "What's in a Number" on page
11 of the January/February/March edition of the
EPA Journal contains a misprint concerning
exponents. A certain level of Pollutant X would
cause a potential risk of 5 x 10'7or 5 additional
cases of cancer per 10 million people (rather than
100 million). The misprint illustrates how easy it
is for regulators like ourselves to get lost in a sea
of numbers.
Staff, Ground Water Management Section
EPA, Region 2
Back Cover:
Satellite images from 1974 (top) and 1992 (bottom) show the progressive
destruction of Mexican rainforests. Red indicates living vegetation; blue,
urban areas or barren landscapes; green, dry natural vegetation; black, wet
soils or wetlands; and white, clouds.
These are composite images generated from Landsat Multispectral
Scanner (MSS) remote sensor measurements of electromagnetic energy
reflected from the Earth's surface. The images were created as part of EPA's
North American Landscape Characterization (NALC)/Pathfinder project, in
conjunction with a global effort led by NASA to monitor the status of tropical
rainforests around the world. NALC is funded by EPA's Office of Research
and Development as a component of the Agency's Global Change Research
Program. The program is being conducted by the Environmental Monitoring
Systems Laboratory, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Images provided by USGS EROS Data Center.
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\
Satellite photos reveal progressive rainforest destruction (see inside back cover).
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