Rio draft weakened
Negotiators for Canada and more than 100 other countries have signed a draft blueprint for sustainable development, but critics say Canada was instrumental in making the plan unduly weak.
After months of trying to boil down proposals, environmental officials at the Rio+20 conference in Brazil finally compromised and delivered a 283-point "vision" for leaders to ratify later this week.
The plan would commit countries to fight climate change with "urgent and ambitious action," increase their aid for developing countries and work out a global set of long-term sustainable development goals to alleviate poverty and prevent global warming.
In the draft, the countries pledge to work with civil society to "renew our commitment to sustainable development, and to ensure the promotion of economically, socially and environmentally sustainable future for our planet and for present and future generations."
Critics say the draft is weak on time-lines, and lacks heft on overseeing the state of the world's oceans.
"It represents a sellout of people and the planet," Cameron Fenton of the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition said in an email from Rio.
"Canada's role has been at its best not engaging in the process, and at worst acting to weaken ambitious language and delete commitments."
Environment Minister Peter Kent, who arrived in Rio late Tuesday afternoon, said the environmentalists' criticism was "unwarranted" and "trivializes" the enormity of the task before negotiators.
"The non-governmental organizations....they know better," Kent said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "Canada takes these things very seriously."
The Rio conference is meant to kickstart action and discussion down the road, not come up with "snap" agreements that are not properly thought out and could well have unintended consequences on sovereignty and domestic policy if adopted without proper scrutiny, Kent said.
About 50,000 delegates and activists have descended on the Brazilian city for the week. Dozens of heads of state will meet today and Thursday, although many industrialized countries sent ministers instead of leaders.
"It's a big failure of Rio, especially since this was talked about as the 'summit of the seas,'" said Susanna Fuller, marine conservation co-ordinator for the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax who was in the negotiating room in Rio.
While regional agreements and fishing accords do control some aspects of biodiversity in some parts of the world's oceans, there are many gaps that beg a global agreement in order to prevent destruction of habitat and ocean pollution, she said.
But Fuller said Canada, the United States, Russia and Venezuela worked together to make sure there would be no new agreement.
Rio draft weakened
