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The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD or theJohannesburg Summit), September 2002, was the third major international meeting on environment and development, following Stockholm 1972 and Rio de Janiero (UNCED) 1992. The outcome is very much more substantial than might be supposed from media coverage, and a short news item cannot do justice to it. The following highlights, with special relevance to land resources, are based on advance documents available September 2002.

Documentation

Major documents, downloadable from the Summit web site, are:

The Plan of Implementation: general issues

There was no need to start afresh. The output from UNCED, Agenda 21, remains the basis, and the action to follow Johannesburg is "a full implementation of Agenda 21".

Sustainable development is now the key, "protecting and managing the natural resource base of economic and social devleopment", recognizing "linkages between poverty, the environment and the use of natural resources", and promoting "sustainable production...within the carrying capacity of ecosystems."

The major targets of the Plan are, by 2015, to halve the proportions of the world's population suffering from poverty (income <$1 per day) and hunger, and the proportion without access to safe drinking water. (Regrettably, however, the World Food Summit follow-up meeting found that the world has already fallen far behind the rate of progress needed to meet this target for hunger.)

Distinctive features of the present plan, as compared with Agenda 21, are:

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) has been replenished to the extent of $3000M. This will greatly facilitate global research programmes, which had suffered due to the falls in funding to international institutions.

Noteworthy (in the light of the criticism directed at the US) are the large financial commitments made by the US towards implementation of the Johannesburg programme, far in excess of those from the EU and other countries.

Outputs specific to land resources

Agriculture, and the land resource base on which it depends, is clearly recognized as central to the reduction of poverty and hunger. "Agriculture plays a crucial role in addressing the needs of a growing global population, and is inextricably linked to poverty eradication." Hence there is a need to "implement integrated land managment and water-use plans [and] to strengthen the capacity of Governments...to monitor and manage the quantity and quality of land and water resources." These are strong and clear statements.

To achieve the objectives, measures include:

Most welcome is the specific recommendation that the Global Environment Fund (GEF) should recognize land degradation and desertification as a 'focal area'. The Land Degradation Assessment for Drylands project (LADA) has been hampered by the fact that the GEF has four focal areas for funding, and only recognizes land degradation as a 'cross-cutting issue'. At the first LADA planning workshop, I argued that land degradation should become an environmental issue in its own right, as has now been recommended.

The missing link: population

There has been progress in international awareness through the recognition that poverty and hunger are closely linked, and that both are highly dependent on agricultural development. One missing link has yet to be recognized, the integral nature of population increase and land development.

The nature of this link is set out in Chapter 14, Population, poverty, and conflict, of Land Resources. It is seen specifically in the causal nexus between population increase, land shortage, poverty and land degradation (LR, p.129), but is manifested more generally wherever population exceeds the supporting capacity of land resources.

An ethically and socially acceptable package of measures to reduce rates of population growth now exists, primarily through improvement in the position of women and provision of family planning services. This package was set out by the Third UN Conference on Population and Development (Cairo 1994). What is now needed is for the international environmental and development communities, and national governments, to link these recommendations on population with efforts to reduce poverty and hunger. We now need to link Cairo 1994 with Johannesburg 2002.

September 2002: interim report, to be revised.

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The Johannesburg Summit meeting is specifically relevant to Chapter 1, Concern for land, and Chapter 15, Awareness, attitudes, and action, of Land Resources: Now and for the Future. Its recommendations, however, have a bearing on virtually all topics discussed in the book.