New beginnings at Rio+20

© IISD

UNEP’s Executive Director Achim Steiner, who spent many of his formative years in Brazil, talks about the issues that the world community will confront in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012.

As the world prepares for Rio+20 – 20 years after the 1992 Earth Summit set the stage for contemporary sustainable development – youth unemployment has emerged as a central preoccupation.

Globally, young people make up a quarter of the workforce but 40 per cent of the unemployed. In many countries of North Africa and the Middle East, youth unemployment hovers around 23-29 per cent or more, the reality of which played a part in the ‘Arab Spring’. In other parts of Africa, youth unemployment is as high as 70 per cent. And in Asia, young people are 4.7 times more likely to be unemployed than adults. But the youth employment crisis isn’t confined to any one region or just developing countries: in the Eurozone, youth unemployment has jumped to one in five, and in some countries the number is even higher.

Even in countries where youth employment seems encouraging, simple statistics can mask the reality. The International Labour Organization (ILO), a partner in UNEP’s Green Economy initiative, estimates that about 28 per cent of all the young people in work remain in extreme poverty, in households surviving on less than $1.25 per person per day. And since the financial crisis, more young people, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, have only been able to find work in the informal sector, the ‘black economy’.

The UN’s 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development says that everyone should have ‘equality of opportunity … in their access to basic resources, education, health services, food, housing, employment and the fair distribution of income’. How to grow economies in a way that generates enough decent jobs – while keeping humanity’s footprint within planetary bounds – will be a burning question when world leaders convene in Rio in June 2012. And never forget that in our world of 7 billion, 1.3 billion people are un- or under-employed, and over the next decade another 500 million young people will start looking for work.

How can Rio+20 respond to these challenges and deliver enhanced employment across the globe? And can the environmental dimension, strengthened in Rio, contribute to the economic pillar that supports the right to development, currently the prize of the few over the hopes and dreams of the many? UNEP’s report, Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication, suggests that 2 per cent of global GDP invested in 10 key sectors and backed by smart public policies, can grow the global economy and generate employment while avoiding the shocks and crises of the current economic trajectory.

A timely example from the Green Economy report, in this International Year of Forests, is the estimate that an additional 0.034 per cent of global GDP invested in forestry annually, equivalent to $40 billion now, could boost the value of the forestry sector by 20 per cent to $600 billion a year by 2050. More than half the investment would go into planting forests on degraded land and the remainder into conserving forests for a variety of key purposes, from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to enhancing water supplies. And jobs in forestry would be likely to rise from 25 million to 30 million worldwide, if not more.

Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD or REDD+), an initiative that is evolving out of the UN Climate Convention, is one possible source of additional funds. Under the scheme, Indonesia, the host of this year’s International Tunza Children and Youth Conference, is receiving up to $1 billion from Norway. And Indonesia is trail-blazing some of the more pioneering strategies, not only to combat climate change but to accelerate a green economy as a way of implementing the broad aims of sustainable development. In Kalimantan, for example, plans to develop a Green Corridor using the REDD+ funds as a catalyst are at an advanced stage.

Indonesia’s oil palm, a highly lucrative crop but a key driver of deforestation, will only be planted on degraded land. And the country has also made the link between healthy forests and more sustainable mining: there is evidence that deforestation in the uplands is leading to severely diminished river flows in the dry season, meaning that these rivers can no longer support barges carrying ores from the mines. Transportation by barge costs about $10 a tonne whereas by road it costs between $40 and $60 a tonne, and road building is another driver of deforestation. So REDD+ offers the chance not only to keep carbon out of the atmosphere, but also to keep rivers flowing in order to remain competitive and minimize the environmental footprint of other industries. Indonesia is also looking to REDD+ for assistance in creating employment in natural resource management for workers in nearby cities and towns.

The next generation

At the end of the Tunza Conference, the young people issued the Bandung Declaration as an input to the Rio+20 process. The declaration underlines the next generation of leaders’ concerns for the future of the planet and the future of decent work.

The year 1992 was a time of leadership. It is time again for leadership, for justice, and for a new pact with the global public for social progress that can sustain the lives, livelihoods and hopes of this and future generations. A time for a right to development that takes the long view rather than a right to get rich quick.

The last two or three years have been marked by fear, harsh words and for some a sense of powerlessness in the face of the global financial crisis and other challenges – climate change for example. But it has also been an extraordinary time of intellectual debate and discussion in which a wide array of creative and constructive ideas for a fresh way forward has emerged across governments, academia, non-governmental organizations, civic leaders and business, within the UN, and through the unique lens of the world’s young people.

Rio+20 is now providing the food for thought, the fuel and the focus for this global awareness, this sense of endeavour to lead us from the end of an era into a new and optimistic moment for civilization. Brazil, host of the Rio Earth Summit in 2012, is very much part of that fertile debate.

Could Rio+20 represent a moment in time where the ideas, directions and values that link our common humanity – which have been maturing since the UN itself was born – fully flourish, finally bear full fruit? Young people – and the rest of the world – will know in just a few months’ time.