There is no shortage of auguries warning the world's citizens and governments that the global environment is deteriorating and that the pursuit of sustainable development is becoming more urgent by the day. Floods in Somalia, delayed rains in Indonesia to dampen the smog over south-east Asia, drought in parts of southern Africa have plausibly been attributed to environmental degradation. The sober judgment of representative scientists advising the United Nations is at last being heard more loudly: "The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate".
Next week representatives of over 150 states meet in Kyoto, Japan, to decide on how to deal with climate change by adopting legally-binding targets and timetables to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Unfortunately, there is little prospect that they will be able to take action sufficient to fulfil the undertakings given in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted at Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It was agreed there that in order to do so it would be necessary to stabilise emissions at 1990 levels by 2000.
In the run-in to the Kyoto meetings the main players have announced how they are to adjust to these commitments. The European Union states have undertaken to meet the targets, and even expect to reduce their emissions by 15 per cent by 2010. But the United States, responsible for a substantially greater proportion of such pollution (around one quarter of the global total), has announced it will not be in a position even to begin reducing its emissions until 2008. No wonder this has been described by EU spokesmen as a recipe for "environmental disaster". It is presented, plausibly, as a capitulation by President Clinton to special pleading by oil, coal and motor interests, orchestrated and amplified by the Republican majority in Congress.
This US position sets the scene for the Kyoto negotiations. The most developed parts of the world are responsible for most of its pollution, so that a failure by them to adhere to commitments made in Rio could indeed spell disaster for the environment. Just as there are many auguries of environmental deterioration, so now there are more and more voices warning that a failure to take appropriate action could spell doom for global ecological recovery. Much of this is based on an understandable fatalism about the likely triumph of greed over need and a deep-seated reluctance among the most developed states to face the ecological consequences of their production and consumption priorities. If they can't agree, so the argument goes, there is little likelihood that anyone else will be able to do so.
But the very divisions on environmental targets, both in practice and in policy, between the EU and the US demonstrate that there is no inevitable correlation between high levels of development and environmental irresponsibility. What is required is leadership and a determination by the EU states in Kyoto to ensure their priorities set the global agenda. This would be much better than compromising with a set of unprincipled and ineffective agreements which would most likely allow slipstream states such as India and China, or Australia and Japan, off the hook. It may well be better, as some environmentalists argue, to end up with no deal for now rather than one which formalises a step backwards from the agreements reached at Rio in 1992.