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Eileen B. Claussen, Assistant Secretary for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs Remarks to UNEP's 19th Governing Council Nairobi, Kenya, February 5, 1997 Released by the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs

Distinguished Colleagues, Friends:

This Governing Council session represents an historic crossroads for the United Nations Environment Program. As we mark the fifth anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, it is clear to all of us that we have failed to stem the tide of global environmental degradation. As governments, we are behind in fulfilling many of the commitments we have made, and we must rededicate ourselves to meeting those commitments. However, governments acting alone cannot solve the global environmental problems that lie before us. We must have a strong international institution for the environment, and today's UNEP no longer fits that description. The question is whether UNEP can be such an institution again. We have listened carefully to the constructive dialogue of the past week, and we believe the answer will rest with the actions we choose to take here in the next few days. UNEP's Executive Director, Elizabeth Dowdeswell, has given us a positive challenge today. We must take it.

A cursory look at some important global environmental indicators should trouble us all a great deal. Today, some 450 million more people inhabit the planet than in 1992. Most industrialized countries, including the United States, will fail to meet the 1992 pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000.

The destruction of tropical forests, which occurred at the astounding rate of roughly 15 million hectares a year in the 1980's, continues virtually unabated - with serious consequences for biodiversity, soil stability, water quality, and climate change. Technology transfer is still only a concept; we have yet to realize it where it matters most.

I could go on, but my purpose here is not to repeat an all-too-familiar litany of environmental woes. Frankly it should come as no great surprise that the global environment is noticeably worse off than five years ago. Consciousness raising and green rhetoric - not realism - fueled the optimism of Rio. One lesson we should have learned by now is that meaningful responses to problems like climate change, poor water quality, and environmentally unsustainable development will require less grandiloquence and more grit.

Our approach to the global environmental challenges we face must be coordinated, cost-effective, and convincing. Today, it is none of the above. Instead, the responsibility for dealing with international environmental concerns has spread across a range of international bodies and through over a dozen major international conventions. The fragmentation that results leads to poor communication, unnecessary layers of administration, and an overall inability to see the forest through the trees.

We find ourselves in this situation in part because we do not have a forceful international institution for the environment. In past decades, UNEP played this role well, working among many other things to catalyze the Montreal Protocol and the Regional Seas program. Today, however, UNEP suffers from a loss of focus, strategic vision, and influence. Instead of doing a limited number of things effectively, its work plan is disjointed and lacks clear priorities. Perhaps of greatest concern, UNEP has failed to exert leadership on a variety of fronts, including in the WTO Committee on Trade and Environment and in the Global Environment Facility.

The result is that UNEP has been marginalized to a perilous extent. Contributions to the Environment Fund have plummeted from a peak of nearly $67 million US dollars in 1993 to barely half of that for 1996. This is unacceptable. Even more telling, earmarked contributions now exceed those to the Environment Fund - meaning, in essence, that the organization's agenda is being auctioned off piecemeal rather than being driven by an overall strategic plan. No strong institution would tolerate this, and we, the government representatives in this room, should not tolerate this.

UNEP needs to get back to basics. That means, in the view of the United States, that the institution should focus on four core objectives.

First, UNEP should assert itself as the forum where governments gather to set global environmental priorities and address emerging global problems. It must monitor and assess global trends, bring issues of concern to governments, and help build consensus on difficult policy issues.

Second, UNEP should manage and integrate the secretariats of the major international environmental conventions, helping governments to deal effectively with the substance of those agreements and with the linkages among them.

Third, UNEP should promote and enhance implementation of, and compliance with, multilateral environmental agreements. It is one thing to complete a complex environmental negotiation. It is quite another to actually implement what is negotiated. UNEP can play a key role in assisting governments and in monitoring their progress in making these accords work.

Fourth, UNEP should aggressively work to integrate environmental concerns into other international organizations as well as within the UN system as a whole. The Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the UN Development Program are among the key fora in which environmental concerns must be better and more consistently reflected.

Meeting these objectives will require comprehensive reform of UNEP, both of its governance structure and of its basic organization.

UNEP's current governance system is bulky and inefficient, making it virtually impossible for the Secretariat to receive timely and useful policy guidance from governments between biennial meetings of this Council. In order to change this, we need to establish a small executive committee, fully representative of UNEP, that can be brought in on a more frequent basis to provide direction and guidance.

Organizationally, UNEP today is very difficult to administer, with the institution seeming more like a range of disparate programs cobbled together than a coherent and well-functioning machine. That is why we must also set up an ad hoc committee charged with looking at every aspect of the institution. This group, which would report to the next Governing Council, should prepare a set of recommendations with an eye toward reinventing UNEP, so that it is effectively organized to reach its objectives.

Clearly, this is strong medicine. But equally clearly, we are dealing with a very sick patient. If I may paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, "time is no healer; the patient may no longer be there." In June, world leaders will congregate in New York for the UN Special Session marking five years since Rio - a meeting that will once again focus international attention on the state of the global environment. This time, however, consciousness raising and green rhetoric will not be enough. The pressure will be on all of us to articulate a clear and realistic vision for how we can do better. If we cannot, by then, take the needed actions to turn UNEP around, not only will the vision be incomplete but UNEP will not be part of it. And instead of leading the way into the dawn of a new and more sustainable century, UNEP will simply fade away into the dusk of this one. We must work together to prevent such an outcome.

Thank you.

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