Rio: So much to do, so little time – WBNews

Along with thousands of government delegates, activists, academics, business chiefs and other journalists I’m making my way this week to Rio de Janeiro. The event is the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, better known as Rio+20. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called it a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to make real progress towards the sustainable economy of the future”. Other descriptions range from a “milestone opportunity” to cut poverty and protect the economy, an agenda laden with “greenwash” and a “farce”. It promises to be a busy time for all, especially for government negotiators. Their job this week is to knock the draft text into a near-finished state, so ministers can come in next week, sign it off and head for the airport looking like they’ve accomplished something worthwhile. Currently, the text is far from finished. An extra negotiating session convened in New York that ended on 2 June has resulted in a document that is only about 20% agreed; and many of the divisions that remain are anything but trivial, resulting from fundamentally different views about how the world should be. What makes things more complex is, as I’ve discussed before, the varied nature of the agenda, ranging from high seas protection to universal access to clean energy to corporate sustainability reporting. The text as it existed at the end of that New York session fell into my hands last week (The Guardian has helpfully posted it). It’s riddled with brackets and phrases such as “Iceland delete; Nigeria retain”, indicating that…more detail