Corporate money men fill the political void at Rio+20

Move over Ban Ki-moon, the corporate money men are in town. That was the message from the final hours of the otherwise damp-squib Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero last week.

On Friday, as delegates prepared to go home, UN officials toured the halls explaining why the official declaration struck by government delegations earlier in the week, titled The World We Want, was so devoid of concrete commitments to fight planetary perils and injustice.

"We can't legislate sustainable development in the current state of international relations," said Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Programme. There was no political leadership, and hence no political commitment to protect the oceans, and only platitudes where there should be schemes to uplift the poor and create a green economy.

But despite the political void, the organisers could still claim a major success. Corporations, who were largely absent from the first Earth Summit in Rio 20 years ago, were coming to the table, Steiner said. Where politicians shrank from commitments, corporations were overflowing with them.

The conference secretary-general Sha Zukang said some 1500 business leaders had attended the summit, and had stumped up half a trillion dollars of corporate cash to fund various UN agendas, though it was unclear how much of this was new money and how much was simply mainstream corporate investment.

Among the new corporate actors at the heart of UN policymaking on the green agenda is Chad Holliday, chairman of the Bank of America and former president of DuPont. He is now also co-chair of the Sustainable Energy For All initiative led by UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon that aims to unlock private investment to deliver its eponymous pledge by 2030. The initiative would be "the greatest public-private partnership of all time", Holliday said at the summit.

Ban's energy plan, which was heavily promoted by UN officials throughout the conference, aims to connect 1.3 billion people to electricity and end the reliance of more than 2 billion people on lung-damaging charcoal and firewood for cooking. It also has targets for doubling the contribution of sustainable sources to world energy, and improving energy efficiency.

Business had already pledged $50 billion, said Holliday's co-chair of the initiative, Kandeh Yumkella, director-general of the UN Industrial Development Organization: "More than a billion people will benefit." Business too, agreed Holliday. "Companies are here because they see opportunities."

The energy plan is seen within the UN as a prototype for achieving the kind of sustainable development goals that the conference agreed should be drawn up in the next three years. Ban said that in future "business leaders [are] to be part of the creation and promotion of new sustainable development goals."

The conference could not agree on what the goals should cover, but topics are likely to include food, water supply and transport. The Asian Development Bank, along with seven other development banks, announced that in the coming decade it hopes to mastermind public and private investment of $175 billion on greener transport systems in developing countries, including railways, buses and more fuel-efficient vehicles.

For many here, the future of the UN's activity in promoting sustainable development looks less like a coalition of national governments driven by common goals, and more like a series of corporate initiatives.

Tim Wirth, a veteran US environmental policymaker who now heads the UN Foundation, which aims to link up the UN system with business, told a press conference that this new world order was on view already. "Public-private partnerships are the dominant theme here in Rio," he told a press conference. "The official document is less important."

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