Sustainable development has been placed on the international agenda through a series of international conferences organized by the United Nations. The first of these meetings was the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972 which was a critical catalyst in putting environmental issues on both national and international agendas. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) otherwise known as the ‘Earth Summit’, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 resulted in a set of agreements on environmental issues ranging from climate change, biodiversity and forest preservation, to Agenda 21 which is a global plan of action for achieving sustainable development. In 2002 the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was held in Johannesburg, South Africa. Prior to the WSSD conference there was widespread agreement that progress in implementing sustainable development had been minimal since the 1992 Earth Summit, with poverty deepening and environmental degradation worsening. It was agreed that what was needed was a plan of action with widespread participation.

The 2002 Johannesburg Summit laid the groundwork for action. The targets, timetables and commitments agreed upon at Johannesburg are broad and sweeping. Examples of these targets include: to halve by 2015, the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than $1 a day; to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation; to use and produce chemicals by 2020 in ways that do not lead to significant adverse effects on human health and the environment; to maintain or restore depleted fish stocks to levels that can produce the maximum sustainable yield by 2015; and to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction in the current rate of loss of biological diversity. Commitments were not only by governments, but also by NGOs, intergovernmental organizations and businesses, who launched over 300 voluntary initiatives.

How well explicit commitments are upheld and whether sufficient funding and projects are launched internationally will determine whether WSSD is deemed a success or failure in the future. Johannesburg did, however, provide a shift from traditional diplomatic agreements between governments, to more project-oriented partnerships that may include non-governmental organizations and the private sector as well as interested governments.

Will Johannesburg make a genuine difference? The purpose of this task force is to explore effective means of achieving sustainable development. We will start by using the commitments of WSSD and try to determine what specific technical options and implementation strategies would be most effective in achieving the Summit’s sustainability objectives