INTRODUCTION

  1.  A decade on from the Rio Earth Summit, the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was held in September 2002 in Johannesburg. It marked an important step on the road towards achieving sustainable development, building on the Stockholm (1972) and Rio (1992) Summits. The UN General Assembly asked the Summit to assess progress on interrelated economic, environmental and social issues, identify gaps and new challenges (such as globalisation) since Rio, and agree action to deliver real improvements in quality of life for people around the world. This was an ambitious and complex mandate and naturally, there were some disappointments. But the final outcome represents a significant step.

  2.  WSSD was one of a series of recent conferences aimed at sustainable development. The Summit built on the reinvigorated international political momentum coming from the positive outcomes of the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, which agreed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Doha (November 2001), which agreed an agenda for a World Trade Round focussed on development, and agreements at the Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development (March 2002) to increase the volume and effectiveness of international aid.

  3.  The UK Government's overarching objective for the Summit was to make globalisation work for sustainable development, especially for the poorest. The UK wanted the Summit to herald a move from rhetoric to the implementation of the sustainable development agreements reached at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and delivery of the Millennium Development Goals and other related international targets.

THE SUMMIT

  4.  There were three main achievements from the Summit:

—  a statement by world leaders underlining their commitment to global sustainable development;

—  an intergovernmental Plan of Implementation (POI) setting out what needed to be done to achieve global sustainable development; and

—  a number of partnerships involving governments and stakeholders such as civil society groups, businesses and NGOs to deliver sustainable development.

Key achievements

  5.  Some of the key achievements were:

—  closer links between development and environment policy, in the service of sustainable development. Good environmental and natural resource management are essential to sustainable livelihoods and achieving the MDGs;

—  strong recommitment to the Monterrey goal of increased effectiveness and volume of development assistance. Widespread agreement that to be of lasting benefit development assistance needs to be directed at helping the poor;

—  new work programmes on access to water, sanitation and energy services, as well as adding to the existing MDGs with a target to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation;

—  recognition that globalisation offers both opportunities and challenges, and of the conditions necessary to help ensure that its benefits are maximised for all, particularly the poorest;

—  agreement that corporate social responsibility should be actively encouraged and promoted;

—  integration of international trade into the wider sustainable development agenda, reinforcing the need to deliver the Doha Development Agenda (DDA), particularly commitments on market access and subsidies;

—  reinforced commitment to ensuring the multilateral trading system and Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) are mutually supportive;

—  agreement to develop a 10-year framework of programmes to accelerate the shift to more sustainable patterns of consumption and production de-linking economic growth and environmental degradation, and to bring development within the carrying capacity of ecosystems;

—  on oceans, a new, targeted international focus on building sustainable fisheries, with depleted stocks to be restored as a matter of urgency and no later than 2015 (where possible): and the establishment of networks of marine protected areas by 2012;

—  a target to reduce significantly the current rate of loss of biodiversity by 2010, including by strengthening efforts to control invasive species;

—  agreement to urgently and substantially increase the global share of renewable energy sources, to develop more diverse, advanced, cleaner, affordable and more efficient energy technologies and, where appropriate, to phase out energy subsidies which inhibit sustainable development;

—  a target to use and produce chemicals in ways that lead to the minimisation of significant adverse effects of human health and the environment by 2020 and to help developing countries deal with the management of chemicals and hazardous wastes;

—  strengthening the way the United Nations deals with sustainable development issues, and encouraging UN agencies and other bodies to work together more on sustainable development; and

—  integrated follow up in the UN system of the outcomes of Monterrey and Johannesburg, and the MDGs.

Some Disappointments

  6.  The UK would have preferred stronger targets in some areas, for example on increasing renewable energy use. This was not possible, despite strong pressure by UK and other members of the EU. The UK would also have liked to have gone further in untying development assistance from the purchase of donor goods and services, and for more countries to have committed to ratifying the Kyoto Protocol.

  7.  The negotiations were tough. Countries take different approaches to sustainable development. The UK has generally taken a more progressive approach than many other countries and therefore adopted an ambitious stance on many issues. The delegation worked hard to persuade others.

  8.  But international agreement depends on consensus. Not achieving all the UK's objectives does not equate to failure: it means that our negotiating objectives were challenging. Our ambitious approach paid off. The results were better than expected, particularly agreeing targets and future work programmes. The outcome is overall a good one and the UK continues to press on securing delivery of these commitments.

What difference will WSSD make?

  9.  The real successes will be measured by how far these agreements and targets are translated into action to deliver sustainable development; and how well sustainable development is established as the central operating principle for international and domestic policy making.

  10.  The targets and work programmes give a strong global mandate for action to the UN, to other international institutions such as the World Bank, to regional groupings and to national Governments. The targets set standards against which to measure progress. And targets make it easier to hold people to account. Whether the targets are met and the work programmes achieve their goals will depend on the resources, both human and financial, which Governments and international bodies are prepared to devote to them.

  11.  WSSD will have been a success if, in 10 years time, there are fewer people living in poverty, and significant progress has been made towards achieving the MDGs and WSSD targets; if developing countries have substantially increased their share of global markets, particularly in agriculture and textiles, and the poor are benefiting from that growth; if economies are continuing to grow but we have decoupled growth from environmental degradation; if years of healthy life and life expectancy have risen; if the quality and integrity of environments and ecosystems, locally and globally, have improved. In short, if the world and the UK are developing more sustainably.

PROMISES INTO ACTION: DELIVERING ON THE UK'S WSSD COMMITMENTS

  12.  The Queen's Speech said that "My Government will work for rapid and effective implementation of the agreements reached at the recent World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg". The public sector must take an active lead in producing concrete results. The UK Government will do this in two ways:

—  by incorporating WSSD commitments into delivery plans for Service Delivery Agreements (SDAs);

—  and by taking into account WSSD outcomes in the forthcoming review of the Sustainable Development Strategy, A better quality of life.

Getting WSSD commitments into UK Government delivery plans

  13.  The UK has seventeen main commitments which stem from WSSD: these are set out in Annex A.[1]

  14.  Within the UK Government, Defra has lead responsibility for six of these main commitments—agriculture, oceans, fisheries, biodiversity, sustainable consumption and production, and chemicals. We also have responsibility for a number of partnerships, as do other departments. We are integrating these responsibilities into our delivery plans and, where necessary, we will establish new ones. For example Defra will amend its delivery plan for agriculture to include delivery of our Doha Development Agenda commitments. And on fisheries the plan will include restoring fish stocks. Defra will produce new delivery plans on chemicals, sustainable consumption and production, and international biodiversity commitments.

  15.  My officials are working with other UK Government Departments on their plans to translate WSSD commitments into their delivery plans. Government Departments will also look for additional opportunities to develop joint targets and delivery plans where responsibilities fall to more than one department, for example, on corporate social responsibility, sustainable consumption and production, and the Doha Development Agenda. Indeed on this latter point a joint target has already been agreed between DTI, DFID and FCO.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

  16.  The UK Government worked closely with colleagues in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on preparations for the Summit. Jack McConnell, Rhodri Morgan, David Trimble and Mark Durkan were all in Johannesburg as part of the UK delegation. Officials from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have also been key members of the official level Steering Group on WSSD.

  17.  It is, of course, for the Scottish Executive, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Ministerial team to decide on how best to take forward those outcomes of the Summit which relate to matters falling with their powers. Officials from the devolved administrations are actively pursuing action on these items and continue to liase with Defra and other Government Departments to ensure a coherent approach, where appropriate, across the UK.

Delivery at the local level

  18.  Achieving sustainable development, including implementing the outcomes of the Summit, will also depend on action at the local level. Local authorities and regional partners—including the Regional Development Agencies and Regional Assemblies, as well as Government Offices for the Regions (GOs)—are key players. Defra and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, as the department with policy responsibility on regional and local government, are working closely together on achieving delivery.

  19.  Local authorities are service providers and community leaders: they already have the main tools in place. They will work with local communities to agree local priorities and prepare community strategies to promote and to improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of their areas. In this way they will contribute to the achievement of sustainable development in the UK. Local strategic partnerships bring together the public, private, business, community and voluntary sectors: these partnerships are charged with the preparation and implementation of the community strategy for their area. Regional Development Agencies are specifically tasked with ensuring that their economic development remit is delivered in a sustainable way. And as we move towards greater accountability for governance at the regional level, regional assemblies will have an increasingly important part to play.

  20.  Government Offices, which represent the key Whitehall Departments in the Regions, are uniquely placed to facilitate the delivery of a crosscutting issue like sustainable development, to pull together the threads of Government policy and regional and local delivery and to encourage co-ordination between regional and local partners. They work with partners to ensure that regional sustainable development frameworks and other regional strategies contribute to the delivery of Summit outcomes, and with regional and local partners to influence delivery on the ground.

Partnerships

  21.  While Governments must take the lead on sustainable development, other actors have a full role to play. Voluntary partnerships between Governments and civil society groups, including business and NGOs, are not a substitute for Government commitment: they are a complementary vehicle for stimulating and delivering change. The UK Government will continue to play a full role in the partnerships of which it is a member.

  22.  Internationally, the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) has a key role to play in promoting, facilitating and serving as a focal point for discussion on partnerships. Guidelines for those partnerships that are registered with the UN call for regular public reporting: it is not appropriate for any individual government to ask partnerships for more than this. The UK Government is currently considering precisely how WSSD partnerships can and should be followed up internationally and domestically. It will be important to maintain a watching brief to ensure that lessons are learned and best practice shared so that existing and new partnerships deliver optimal results.

International priorities

  23.  The UK will continue to work with partners in international institutions—UN, G8, OECD, WTO, international financial institutions (IFIs) and EU—to ensure that development, environment and trade policies support the achievement of sustainable development, and that follow up to Johannesburg, Monterrey, Doha, the MDGs and other related international targets is coherent. We are also pushing to develop concrete means for stronger collaboration within and between the UN agencies, the IFIs and the WTO, such as agreement to a new inter-agency mechanism in the UN system on oceans issues. At country level we need to encourage aid effectiveness and the integration of environmental considerations into developing countries' poverty reduction strategies—to ensure development is sustainable.

  24.  To secure more effective mainstreaming of sustainable development at a high level in the UN system, the UK emphasises the strategic need for integrated UN follow-up to WSSD, Monterrey and the MDGs, supporting the ongoing work of the UN's Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD). This has been the subject of complex discussions in the 57th UN General Assembly (UNGA), at the end of 2002. UNGA57 commissioned a working group to produce proposals on how to integrate the follow up processes to the recent Major UN conferences. This Working Group will continue for six months, ending in July.

  25.  UN CSD should in future focus on implementation rather than further negotiation, and strengthen its role in reviewing and monitoring progress on Agenda 21. It should be the focal point for partnerships. CSD will meet in May this year. The UK will be active in developing the agenda.

  26.  The UN Environment Programme's Governing Council (UNEP GC) meeting (Nairobi, 3-7 February) will be considering WSSD follow-up relevant to its remit, in particular chemicals, sustainable consumption and production and poverty and environment linkages.

  27.  Commitment in other UN fora will be essential in taking forward WSSD agreements. For example the UK took a prominent role in securing a successful outcome, both for our own interests and for CITES as a whole, at last November's CITES conference. The effective regulation of trade in threatened species, such as seahorses and mahogany, will help meet the WSSD biodiversity target through sustainable use principles.

  28.  The European Union will be a key forum for taking forward a number of WSSD commitments, we will continue to push for the Spring European Council to give momentum to the EU's work on sustainable development, focussing on practical implementation of WSSD outcomes in the 2003 review of the EU's Sustainable Development Strategy.

  29.  In particular, our priorities for EU-level action will be:

—  in developing policy coherence between internal and external objectives;

—  sustainable consumption and production patterns, including renewable energy, energy efficiency and environmental technology;

—  on chemicals through the forthcoming EU chemicals strategy;

—  on trade and delivering the Doha Development Agenda, including through reform of the CAP and CFP; and

—  on illegal fishing and the EU's marine strategy; and in supporting our aims on UN-level actions.

  Additionally it is important to ensure that the EU's initiatives on access to water and sanitation, and energy deliver long-term benefits.

  30.  Following the Summit, the EU General Affairs and External Relations Council agreed to oversee development of an implementation plan which will follow up commitments made at Johannesburg. The UK supports this work and hopes it will identify actions which draw on commitments already made by the EU as well as new undertakings from Johannesburg, to provide a practical map of how the EU is addressing its global responsibilities.

Communicating sustainable development

  31.  WSSD acted as a focus for much debate and discussion, improving awareness of what sustainable development really means, its importance to people's lives and the challenges we face in making it a reality. While this memorandum focuses on the intergovernmental negotiations, WSSD also saw active dialogue within and between civil society, business, the science community—which will have long term value in terms of network and partnership building.

  32.  The UK engaged extensively with stakeholders prior to the Summit, sponsoring events and publications, such as Reaching the Summit, and a WSSD supplement in the national press. At the Summit itself, the delegation offered daily press briefings, which in the eyes of the international press set new standards for openness and availability to discuss key issues. The Secretary of State for Defra gave 35 interviews.

  33.  An interdepartmental working group of officials has been established on sustainable development media to ensure that UK Government takes forward communication of sustainable development in a strategically planned way.

BUILDING ON UK GOVERNMENT'S EXISTING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT WORK

  34.  At the same time as implementing our WSSD commitments, the Government needs to develop its wider approach to delivering sustainable development. Making good our WSSD commitments does not of course represent the full extent of the UK's sustainable development policy and work.

  35.  A better quality of life, a sustainable development strategy for the UK, was published in 1999. The current strategy sets out: the UK Government's domestic priorities and what it will do to deliver on them; the 15 headline indicators against which progress in improving quality of life is measured; the guiding principles and approaches to achieve sustainable development, and what needs to be done internationally.

  36.  The latest UK Government report on progress on sustainable development, Achieving a better quality of life, details progress during 2002. My officials will ensure that the Committee receives copies when the report is launched later this month.

Delivering SD in UK Government

  37.  We are already doing much to promote understanding of sustainable development across UK Government and in Defra and to integrate sustainable development into decision-making.

  38.  Defra's Sustainable Food and Farming Strategy (SFFS) will develop a diverse, modern and adaptable farming industry which is both competitive and sustainable. The Government will work with the whole of the food chain to secure a future for English farming and food industries which is responsive to customers' needs, is profitable and which at the same time contributes to a better environment, and healthy and prosperous communities. This strategy is backed by £500 million of public money over the next three years. In addition the UK Government will continue to press for CAP reform to remove the burdens imposed on the food chain and consumers that result from distorted agricultural markets and to deliver the trade-liberalising agenda of the WTO. For example the Treasury required sustainable development impacts to be identified by Departments in the 2002 Spending Review and a tool for Integrated Policy Appraisal is being piloted in seven UK Government Departments.

  39.  Within the UK Government there is a multitude of activities in hand which fall under the rubric of "sustainable consumption and production" and are designed to assist in decoupling economic growth from environmental degradation and from the use of natural resources and production of waste. They include: the DTI's work on stimulating technological innovation in environmental goods and services; improving the performance of the Government Estate, by setting targets on environmental management systems, travel and use of water and the Treasury's work on environmental taxation, which emphasises the importance of getting the right price signals and providing incentives; and making Government procurement take more account of the need for sustainable development. Defra's own Departmental sustainable development strategy was launched before WSSD and will be reviewed this summer.

  40.  Many of the themes in the WSSD Plan of Implementation (POI) are areas where Defra already has a major role in the delivery of change. The broad heading of sustainable production and consumption is also a useful way of looking at the major topics of energy, waste and resource use more widely. There have been studies on each of these topics by the PIU/Strategy Unit; this will lead shortly to an Energy White Paper and a Government response to the recommendations on waste.

  41.  A number of existing programmes are contributing to the delivery of more sustainable production and consumption—for example the Sustainable Technologies Initiative; the Envirowise programme; WRAP; the Market Transformation Programme; the work of the Carbon Trust and Energy Saving Trust.

  42.  If we are to deliver sustainable development it is crucial that we begin to tackle our growing mountain of waste. This means designing products which use fewer materials and using processes that produce less waste. It means putting waste to good use, through re-using, recycling and composting.

  43.  And the forthcoming Government White Paper on Energy will set out the UK Government's new energy policy, inter alia on improvements to energy efficiency.

Review of the Sustainable Development Strategy, "A better quality of life"

  44.  The UK Government has promised to review the current strategy, beginning later this year, to have a new strategy in place in 2005. The review will take a fresh look at how we achieve sustainable development in the UK, not least in the light of the outcomes of the WSSD. It will need to re-examine priorities, how to deliver them, and how to measure progress.

Stakeholder involvement

  45.  The review of the strategy is a significant task, and by its very nature will need to closely involve UK Government Departments, the devolved administrations and local government, NGOs and business and other interested parties, including members of the EAC.

  46.  Defra has already started to sound out the views of wider stakeholders on domestic priorities for the UK on sustainable development, and gather views on the current strategy and the challenges and opportunities posed by its review. Amongst the first things to be done at the start of the review will be to develop a strategy for stakeholder consultation and engagement, and to set up a mechanism for cross-government discussions.

Sustainable Development Task Force

  47.  To help inform the strategy review, and plans for driving forward the achievement of sustainable development, the UK Government intends to establish a time-limited Task Force led by Defra. It will comprise Ministers drawn from across Whitehall and the devolved administrations, and other stakeholders. Details of membership and mandate of the taskforce are currently being finalised. The Task Force will be a delivery-focused body, with decisions being taken by ENV, supported by ENV (G), or another Cabinet Committee.

  48.  The Task Force will be underpinned by an interdepartmental working group of officials, including representatives from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This working group will build on the one which prepared for WSSD.

HOW WILL THE UK GOVERNMENT OVERSEE WSSD IMPLEMENTATION?

  49.  It will be for UK Government Departments to take ownership of and responsibility for the WSSD commitments where they have the policy lead. ENV will remain the Ministerial Committee for reviewing the impact on sustainable development of the UK Government's policies.

  50.  Progress on delivering the UK Government's WSSD commitments in Departments' delivery plans will be monitored by the Treasury and the Delivery Unit as part of the existing process for assessing performance.

  51.  The UK Government reports annually on progress on sustainable development in the UK, including against the headline indicators in A better quality of life and on international issues. It will continue to do so. Defra will be responsible for reporting on WSSD implementation to the UN's Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD).

  52.  The Regional Co-ordination Unit (RCU) corporate plan, agreed by sponsor Departments, gives Government Offices in particular a role in facilitating delivery of sustainable development at regional and local level.

FROM RHETORIC TO REALITY?

  53.  In conclusion, the UK Government considers WSSD to have represented a critical step forward for international sustainable development; as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has said, "This Summit will put us on a path that reduces poverty while protecting the environment, a path that works for all peoples, rich and poor, today and tomorrow. We have to go out and take action. This is not the end. It's the beginning". The arrangements set out in this memorandum place WSSD commitments at the heart of the UK Government's work, making a reality of the agreements to which the UK signed up. The review of A better quality of life will support continued progress in building a sustainable future at home and globally. We need to press ahead.

February 2003