HIGH-LEVEL ADVISORY BOARD ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT TO MEET IN MONACO, 14-17 JANUARY

6 January 1997

Press Release
ENV/DEV/394

HIGH-LEVEL ADVISORY BOARD ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT TO MEET IN MONACO, 14-17 JANUARY

19970106 Board's Seventh Session to Prepare Policy Recommendations On Energy, Water and Transport for Assembly's Special Session on Agenda 21

NEW YORK, 6 January (DPCSD) -- The High-Level Advisory Board on Sustainable Development will hold its seventh session in Monaco from 14 to 17 January at the invitation of the Government of Monaco. During the session, the Board is scheduled to prepare a report for the special session of the General Assembly to review and appraise progress in the implementation of Agenda 21, the programme of action adopted by the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). The Board, which has selected energy, water and transport as critical issues for sustainable development in the twenty-first century, will present in its report policy recommendations drawn from recent experience in many countries in addressing those issues.

The High-Level Advisory Board on Sustainable Development was established by the Secretary-General following the 1992 Rio Earth Summit in order to advise him, and through him the Commission on Sustainable Development and other United Nations bodies, on matters relating to environment and development. The Board is an expert body with 18 members serving in their personal capacities. They come from 18 different countries and from government agencies, educational and research institutions, non-governmental organizations and the private sector. The Board meets twice a year to formulate policy proposals, examine innovative approaches to sustainable development and identify emerging issues to be brought to the attention of intergovernmental and coordinating bodies of the United Nations system. At the session in Monaco, the Board will also discuss its future work programme.

The Secretary-General has requested the Board, in preparing its report, to take a long-term perspective of sustainable development and to focus on issues that have not been adequately addressed by intergovernmental bodies. The Secretary-General has also requested the members of the Board to serve as his emissaries to the various constituencies they represent in order to promote the role of the United Nations in sustainable development. The

Board's members are appointed by the Secretary-General for a term of three years.

At the forthcoming session, discussions will involve not only members of the Board, but also a number of invited experts in the fields of energy, water and transport development. Among them are representatives of Lyonnnaise des Eaux, Dow Europe, Electricité de France, the South African electricity utility Eskom, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Discussions are expected to focus on promoting private cooperation among international, governmental and private sector organizations and on ways to promote private investment in sustainable development of energy, water and transport.

In considering issues of environmental protection and resource conservation, the Board will also examine ways to promote economic and social development in developing countries in ways that are economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. A particular focus of the seventh session will be the mobilization of investment for providing electricity to the some 2 billion people in rural areas of developing countries who do not currently have access to electrical power. In many remote and rural areas, the use of solar power and other renewable energy sources for decentralized electricity generation may be more economical than extending conventional electricity grids, but existing energy utilities and financing institutions are often not oriented to providing small-scale decentralized services.

In selecting energy and transportation as critical issues to be addressed by this meeting, the Board has noted that fossil fuels provide the major part of world energy supplies and virtually all fuel used in transportation. Moving towards more sustainable energy and transportation economies will require major changes in such policies as subsidies for energy and transportation, as well as in energy research programmes. Because of the great size of the energy and transportation sectors, such policy changes will yield results only over several decades. The Board has also noted that the world will depend on fossil fuels for many decades to come, but agreed that the environmental impact of energy consumption could be reduced both through increasing energy efficiency and through the development of non-fossil fuels. In its preparatory work, the Board has concluded that improvements in energy efficiency and the use of renewable sources of energy would be greatly encouraged by the internalization of environmental costs into the price of energy.

In addition, the Board has noted that the transport sector accounts for about a quarter of world commercial energy demand and that it has important impacts on sustainable development through greenhouse gas emissions, effects of pollutants on human health, urban congestion and other factors. In its preparatory work, the Board has identified three key objectives for policies

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to promote sustainable energy and transportation: first, reducing emissions from transportation systems; second, shifting traffic to cleaner transportation systems; and third, rationalizing the demand for transportation.

In identifying water resources as a critical area for sustainable development in the twenty-first century, the Board has noted that clean water is a vital resource subject to increasing scarcity in a growing number of countries throughout the world. Increased demand for water for agricultural, industrial and domestic uses will give rise to competition and perhaps conflict between different users and different countries dependent on the same limited water supplies. That will be a particular problem where water resources have been over-exploited or contaminated. As with other natural resources in scarce supply, water pricing is central to efficient use, but must be part of a complex set of policies for integrated watershed management. Possible measures that the Board will consider for sustainable long-term management of water resources include social cost pricing of water, reduction or elimination of general subsidies for water use, restructuring of tax systems to promote efficient use of water, and the use of transferable water rights.

The Board will submit its report to the Secretary-General, who will forward it to the Commission on Sustainable Development, which will meet in April, and to the Assembly's special session, which will convene in New York in June. The Commission and the Assembly will use the Board's report and a variety of other reports in their consideration of the future work of the United Nations in promoting sustainable development throughout the world into the twenty-first century.

The officers of the Board are the following: Birgitta Dahl, of Sweden, is Chairman; Emil Salim, of Indonesia, is Vice-Chairman; and Jörg Imberger, of Australia, is the Rapporteur. The other members are as follows: Maria Julia Alsogaray, of Argentina; Christina Amoako-Nuama, of Ghana; Princess Basma Bint Talal, of Jordan; Nikolai Drozdov, of the Russian Federation; David A. Hamburg, of the United States; Abid Hussein, of India; Jacques Lesourne, of France; Marcilio Marques Moreira, of Brazil; Laura Novoa, of Chile; David Pearce, of the United Kingdom; Maurice Strong, of Canada; Suh Sang-Mok, of the Republic of Korea; Mostafa Tolba, of Egypt; Qu Geping, of China; and Ernst Ulrich von Weizsacker, of Germany.

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