Posted on September, 03 2002

Johannesburg, South Africa - WSSD, The World Summit of Shameful Deals (formerly known as the World Summit on Sustainable Development), has failed dramatically to take the action needed to reduce the patterns of unsustainable production and consumption that are impoverishing our planet and the people who live on it. Although the Summit did have a few positive outcomes, overall it did not produce the types of commitments that WWF and others believe are necessary to achieve sustainable development. Over the last few days of the Summit, world leaders emphasized the importance of sustainable development in their speeches, making promises of unilateral action and funding. However, this only served to highlight the failure of the Action Plan to provide a clear road map for how to achieve sustainable development. "Overall, this is a deal that in the long term will benefit neither the countries who stitched it up, nor those countries who stood by and allowed it to happen," said Dr Claude Martin, Director General of WWF International. "Apart from some limited commitments to protect our oceans and fish stocks and provide sanitation, the summit will do almost nothing to help reduce our damaging global footprint. Although many individual countries want to do far more, the summit texts are mostly a race to the bottom." The Action Plan is notably lacking in clear targets and timetables on a range of crucial issues. It has failed to ensure that the citizens of the world can have access to clean energy; has promised access to water and sanitation for the poor, but has failed to protect or manage the origins of that water; has failed to confirm the supremacy of the needs of poor people and the environment over the free trade agenda and is weaker than existing agreements on controlling chemicals that threaten nature and our health. Among the few positive outcomes of the Summit has been the announcement by the Government of Brazil, the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), the World Bank, and WWF of the largest ever tropical forest protection plan. The Amazon Regional Protected Area (ARPA) ensures that 500,000 sq. km of the Amazon will be put under federal protection — three times the amount that is already protected, and an area almost twice the size of the UK. "WWF believes that there are many groups who think that this Summit should have done much more. We hope to work with them to develop concrete field and policy based sustainable development programmes, and promote solutions and policy alliances which can mitigate current flaws in the multilateral system," Dr Martin added. For further information contact: South African media: Christine Riley Tel.: +27 828 739 772 German, Swiss, Austrian media: Ulrike Hellmessen, Tel.: +27 828 588 517 Other African media: Catherine Mgendi Tel.: +27 828 588 522 UK media: Jamie Grant Tel.: 0828 588 505 Italian media: Maria Grazia Midulla Tel.: +27 828 588 530 Other media: Thomas Schultz-Jagow Tel.: +27 828 588 582 Other media: Kyla Evans Tel.: +27 828 588 464