World Summit on Sustainable Development opens in Johannesburg

The World Summit on Sustainable Development will take place in Johannesburg on August 26 through 4.

The summit is part of the forums and measures which are held and taken under the United Nations aegis and are aimed at ensuring sustainable economic development all over the world with preservation of the ecological balance on our planet.

The UN's first environment conference took place on June 5-6, 1972 in Stockholm. To mark its twentieth anniversary the World Conference on Environment and Development (Rio Summit) took place in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. That forum brought forth the Agenda for the 21st Century - a document which contained concrete measures aimed at promoting sustainable development of the world civilisation in harmony with nature.

By fulfilling decisions of the Rio Summit, over the past ten years, it has become possible to lower the death rate from fever, diphtheria and tuberculosis. The industrially developed countries have almost stopped producing gases which destroy the ozone layer of the Earth's atmosphere.

At the same time, the death rate from AIDS in the 1990s increased by six times. The amount of the effluent of the gases which cause a greenhouse effect went up by nine percent. Despite the commitment the summiteers made to cut the developing countries' debt dependence, their debt in the past decade has grown by 34 percent and reached 2.5 billion dollars.

The upcoming forum in Johannesburg has been organised by the United Nations in cooperation with the JOWSCO company, specially founded for this purpose. It will be attended by delegations from 189 countries. The Russian delegation will be led by Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.

The summit will discuss the problems of promoting sustainable development of the world civilisation, the improvement of the ecological situation on the planet and combating poverty in developing countries.

The forum will map out concrete steps for improving quality of water and sanitary conditions primarily in African countries. This will allow to sharply cut the death and sick rate. It will also discuss the problems of access to energy resources, the expansion of the use of the restored sources of energy and progress in implementing the decisions of the Kyoto protocol. Considerable attention will be paid to the measures aimed at raising efficiency of agricultural production, preventing the land exhaustion and preserving the existing ecological system on the planet.

The question of writing off the developing countries' debts and of the access of their goods to the developed countries' markets will be considered separately.

Apart from official sessions, the summit envisages additional events - lectures, exhibitions and presentations.