Sunday June 22 4:04 PM EDT

Global Environmental Summit to Open in N.Y.

By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS (Reuter) - With considerable frustration, world leaders gather in New York this week to take stock of how well they have protected the atmosphere, water and forests and helped poor nations develop without polluting the Earth.

The leaders are delivering a report card, beginning on Monday, on how close they have come to safeguarding the planet as envisaged at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, dubbed by some the environmental Woodstock of the 1990s.

And as expected, no one is living up to the pledges in Rio, as differences abound on how pollution, global warming, and overfishing can be diminished with the least pain.

"Let us not expect anything big," cautioned Razali Ismail, a prime mover in organizing the Rio summit. He is now president of the U.N. General Assembly in charge of the Earth Summit Plus Five that begins on Monday.

Many heads of state or government are not coming, particularly from major developing states like China and India, as well as Mexico.

Even Razali said he was unable to convince his prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, to attend because he believed there had been too much "fudging and backpedaling."

But more than 60 leaders will be there, including President Clinton, the prime ministers of nearly every European country, Japan and Canada. And every country will address the forum in speeches that stretch over four days.

At the end of the conference, a lengthy paper of principles and targets will emerge, with negotiators hoping the leaders will contribute to areas where no agreement has emerged.

In Rio some 10,000 diplomats produced "Agenda 21" of 2,500 goals, followed over the last few years by treaties on climate change, biological diversity or conservation and land degradation.

And in the last five years the world's population has not increased as quickly, food production has risen and health benefits have reached more people.

But the bad news since Rio is that fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce, forests are diminishing and a billion people are living on $1 a day and using any resource available just to stay alive.

Emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming and climate changes have increased. Carbon dioxide climbed to 6.24 billion tons a year in 1996, as industry grows in the developing world.

The United States, with nearly 23 percent of the world's total carbon emissions, increased its output more than eight percent in the last five years.

"Overall, we haven't made the fundamental change of course promised in Rio," said Canadian businessman Maurice Strong, who was secretary-general of that conference.

Many developing nations are refusing any commitments until rich states keep their promises in Rio for assistance they need for basic technological, health and educational programs. But such aid is decreasing rather than rising.

Direct government aid in the last five years has fallen among all industrial nations, particularly the United States. Private investment is concentrated in a few countries.

The Third World "wants money at almost any cost and the North wants environmental protection at almost no cost," said the Outreach 1997 newsletter for environmental groups.

"There is a serious breakdown on consensus on many topics," said Barbara Bramble of the World Wildlife Fund. "In fact it's catastrophic."

But the North-South polarization is matched by a major split among industrial nations, with the European Union attempting to pressure the United States, Japan and Canada to agree to sharp cuts in greenhouse gases.

The EU agreed last week to call for a 15 percent cut in greenhouse gases in 2010 from their 1990 levels. But others want a vaguer reference to reductions without any precise target at this time.

In Denver, at the Group of Seven summit of industrial nations, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook explained the trans-Atlantic split in terms of a cultural divide between Europe and the United States and Canada.

"Both of them find it very difficult to deal with a domestic audience which is still very much in a culture of large, extravagant private cars and generous consumption of energy as a cheap commodity," he said.

"The lifestyle of America and elsewhere cannot be contained much beyond another quarter of a century without serious effects on our climate," he said.

Copyright © 1997 Reuters Limited.

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