Is the West using environment as an excuse?

A woman wades through a flooded street in Bahia, Brazil. [iStockphoto]

When the Cold War was ending in the late eighties, a general hope of a peaceful and prosperous future for the world inspired formulation of the Sustainable Development (SD) concept, the best plan of solidarity.

It was based on efforts by countries to build a world of economic growth for all, social progress, and clean and healthy environment.

What made it revolutionary was a comprehensive approach to all the socio-economic ills that had plagued humanity for centuries. All the three "pillars" of SD were recognised equally important, and the achievement of each one of them could be possible only together with the other two.It was also unique because of a commitment by the more affluent countries to help the less fortunate.

The concept was universally acclaimed and enthusiastically adopted at the Rio UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 and reconfirmed in Johannesburg in 2002.

However, soon it became clear that the rich North was not in a hurry to deliver on their part of the deal of providing adequate resources to help the developing world. They started bringing "conditionalities" for their development assistance, like human rights (in their perverted interpretation), combating corruption (as if it was not them who were responsible for most corruption around the world), gender (a new concept to "replace" the normal notion of sex), etc.

Needless to say only few countries were able to comply with these requirements. Hence, most of the South was short-changed in their expectations for external assistance. At the same time, the West was insisting that developing countries must fulfil all their environmental obligations immediately.

Thus, a system was being created that actually disadvantaged the poor. Because the North in its development and quest for wealth, historically never cared about environmental damage, and now, after all the harm had already been done, they started demanding that the South take the brunt of responsibility for global environment. That was a recipe for perpetual underdevelopment.

But that was not all. After they discovered that even in those circumstances the developing countries still managed to survive, grow, and compete, they started a new tactic consisting of systematically downplaying the social and economic pillars of SD and "prioritise" only environment.

Can you remember any Western leader speak loudly about SD in the last five years? I can't. All we hear is climate, biodiversity, protection of environment and climate again.

Why is it so? The focus on environment gives them a competitive edge over the emerging economies who simply can't afford the necessary technologies or resources and have so many problems of poverty, food, health, education - the kind of challenges that the West had resolved before they started caring about environment. And, incidentally, before they had to part with their colonies. Now they are trying to use environment as an excuse for restrictive tariff and customs measures for their own economic and commercial benefit, claiming moral superiority because they are "saving the Planet".

A case in point is EU's unilateral "Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism" whereby they give themselves the right to charge additional fees (or fines) on the exports from countries whose industries they think are "not clean enough". If this racket works with climate, they will expand it to other areas.

They don't care if millions of people starve or hundreds of countries remain underdeveloped forever. What counts for them is profit.

I doubt that they will charge themselves for increasing the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from reverting to coal, oil or even lignite-based electricity generation over the last couple of years or massive environmental damage from shale gas fracking. It is the Global South that they will blame and charge for everything. Beware!

-The writer is Russian Ambassador to Kenya