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Environment Reporting
The U.N. homepage for the Johannesburg summit 2002.
age, management often
promotes the reporter to
a coordinating position
in the newsroom, effectively
preventing that
journalist from using the
knowledge and access to
sources that have taken
years of work to build.
Despite my professional
discontent, the Rio
conference turned out
much more positively
than had been expected.
U.S. President George
Bush attended at the last
minute as a result of international
and domestic
political pressure. And
two very important U.N.
conventions were signed,
one on climate change,
the other on biodiversity.
Wealthier countries did
not commit themselves
to specific financing goals
towards supporting sustainable
development in
poorer nations, but at
least they accepted a target
of doubling their development-aid
spending
from an average 0.36 percent
of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
(In fact, even in our Rio coverage, most
of our stories were about the financing
of sustainable development in poor
countries, not actual environmental issues.)
At the conference’s conclusion,
it seemed that global environmental
issues were on a promising, albeit difficult,
track.
This expectation could not have
been more off the mark. As economic
good times emerged in some developed
nations, most notably in the
United States, environmental concerns
plummeted from their place as a priority.
The United States—the world’s
dominant consumer of environmental
resources—kept to its unsustainable
path of consumption as Americans’
fondness for gas-guzzling sport utility
vehicles grew. Meanwhile, fuel prices
rose steadily in almost all other nations.
In 10 years, worldwide carbon
dioxide emissions went up 4.6 percent,
while official development aid
from developed countries went down
to 0.22 percent of GDP, instead of up
to the 0.7 percent agreed to in Rio.
Early in his term, President George W.
Bush made clear that the United States
would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol (an
international agreement to curtail global
warming) in spite of a decade of
excruciating negotiations.
The 2002 Johannesburg
Conference and Beyond
As a result of this downward spiral of
environmental issues in the global
agenda, environmental journalists
sensed that the conference, dubbed
Rio + 10, was going to be a total flop.
President Bush kept his word and never
showed up; Secretary of State Colin
Powell came on his behalf on the last
day of the summit. Nevertheless, hundreds
of news outlets throughout the
world sent reporters
to Johannesburg. Our
newspaper published
a six-page special section
before the summit.
It presented a
rather pessimistic
view, such as the lead
story that appeared
under the headline, “A
Década Perdida do
Ambiente” (“The
Environment’s Lost
Decade”). Our reporters
sent daily stories
from Johannesburg
about efforts the Brazilian
delegation and
many European
Union countries made
to get a commitment
that 10 percent of global
energy production
would be from clean
sources—nonfossil,
non-nuclear and no gigantic
hydropower—
by 2012. (The current
share is 2.2 percent.)
And they reported on
the thwarting of this
effort by the United
States and Arab oilproducing
countries.
American journalists were there, too,
but the conference’s timing converged
with the first anniversary of September
11, so their reporting didn’t receive the
attention it otherwise might have. With
talk of possible war also dominating
the American news, these negotiations
taking place in endless meetings in a
distant African nation about issues that
can seem like abstract entities were
unlikely to draw much public interest
in the United States.
I stayed in São Paulo, sending my
young assistant editor, Claudio Angelo,
to cover the summit. My general directive
was for our two-member team
(Angelo plus a political reporter/columnist)
to bypass the daily haggling
over commas and brackets in official
U.N. documents and identify and speak
with the conference’s leading figures,
including heads of state and respected
environmentalists. I wanted to portray
Nieman Reports / Winter 2002 81