Rio+20: What does the disappointing outcome say about future environmental agreements?
Last week, negotiators from 188 countries met in Rio de Janeiro for the Rio+20 Summit in an attempt to find common ground on future global environmental policy. The world's most pressing long-term problems were not resolved at the three-day meeting.
The final document produced by the summit is grandly titled "The Future We Want" and runs 49 pages; unfortunately, the document does very little in the way of outlining future action. It uses the word "reaffirm" 59 times and manages to fit in plenty of recognizing, reinvigorating, and underscoring. Specific committments are sparse, while agreement on transparency, good-governance principles, and stakeholder participation show up in virtually every paragraph. Not that these aren't laudable goals, but they definitely don't provide much direction for future international co-operation.
From an environmental standpoint, this is unambiguously a disappointing result. Substantial money and effort have been expended to produce a document that essentially reiterates sentiments expressed by the same set of governments for over a decade. As economic growth slows in industrialized countries and growth in environmental degradation shifts to middle-income countries, the drive for international cooperation on environmental policy has greatly diminished. Wealthy industrialized countries are unwilling to take action which could further depress their largely-moribund economies, and rapidly developing countries are unwilling to take action which would compromise the improvement in their living standards. What does this say about future prospects for international environmental committments?
Results from the academic literature are not encouraging. The most influential paper on self-enforcing international agreements is Barrett (1994), which hypothesizes that under non-cooperative game theory it will be very difficult to reach a binding agreement under which a substantial proportion of countries will limit their emissions. For global problems like climate change it will always be tempting to freeload off other countries' abatement, and moreover there is no feasible punishment for non-participants other than emitting more and inflicting damage upon everyone (which is clearly an undesirable strategy). Further refinements to this research (including Rubio and Ulph (2006) and Kolstad (2007)) have not departed from this basic result. Non-cooperative game theory was largely developed during the Cold War to analyze interactions between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and in this instance it seems like it is accurately describing international interactions.
Governments will almost certainly remain unwilling to make the necessary tradeoffs between current economic growth and future environmental preservation until the tradeoff becomes much less painful. The most effective means of mitigating the effects associated with environmental protection is technological change; when the limits to industrial production become cheap, treaties get signed. This was the case with the Montreal Protocol (which found broad support as substitutes for ozone-depleting CFCs were developed; this case study provides an insightful narrative) and will be the case for any future treaties addressing climate change or other aspects of environmental degradation.
(Image: President Dilma Rousseff at the inauguration of the Brazil Pavillion at Rio+20. From the MCTIBrasil flickr photostream. Licensed under Creative Commons.)
