Diplomats from over 190 countries agreed on a draft text on green global development on Tuesday to be approved this week at a summit in Rio de Janeiro, but environmentalists complained the agreement was too weak.
The summit, known as Rio+20, was supposed to hammer out aspirational, rather than mandatory sustainable development goals across core areas like food security, water and energy, but the draft text agreed upon by diplomats failed to define those goals or give clear timetables toward setting them.
It is “telling that nobody in that room adopting the text was happy. That’s how weak it is,” the European Union’s climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard said on social network Twitter.
The text “has too much ‘take note’ and ‘reaffirm’ and too little ‘decide’ and ‘commit’. (The) big task now for U.N. nations to follow up” on this, she added.
Expectations were low for the summit because politicians’ attention is more focused on the euro zone crisis, a presidential election in the United States and turmoil in the Middle East than on the environment.
