PRESS CONFERENCE ON CHANGING CONSUMPTION PATTERNS IN HUMAN SETTLEMENTS
Press Briefing
PRESS CONFERENCE ON CHANGING CONSUMPTION PATTERNS IN HUMAN SETTLEMENTS
19970414
FOR INFORMATION OF UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT ONLY
At a Headquarters press conference on Friday afternoon, 11 April, four members of an expert group meeting called to bring together new thinking on sustainable development in human settlements discussed priority areas for action. The four member were the following: Mathias Hundsalz, Acting Chief, Research and Development Division, United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat); Raquel Alfaro, spokesperson of the Expert Group on Changing Consumption Patterns in Human Settlements; A.P. Sinha, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Urban Affairs of India; and David Satterthwaite, of the International Institute of Environment and Development.
In his introductory remarks, Mr. Hundsalz noted that the meeting had taken place within the context of preparations for the special session of the General Assembly on implementing Agenda 21. He said the second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) (Istanbul, 1996) had led the international community to make an effort to interpret the concept of sustainable development in the context of human settlements, in the understanding that most of the action required to achieve sustainable development as part of human development and ecological preservation took place in human settlements. However, there continued to be such growth of urban areas worldwide that by the turn of the century the majority of the population was expected to live in cities.
The expert meeting on changing consumption patterns, one of the topics of Agenda 21, had addressed the issue from the perspective of human settlements, he said, adding that it had been guided by such actors as local authorities, businesses and community groups. He stressed that the experts, gathered from all over the world, were aware of the differences in understanding the concept of sustainable consumption. In the North it largely meant reducing the stress on environmental resources and in the South it had more to do with equity in development. Owing to the huge scope of the subject, the group had decided to focus on four sectoral issues: energy, transport, water resources in cities, and waste and waste management. Summarizing the group's report, Ms. Alfaro said the panel had started its assignment by examining the logic of sustainable consumption, the human settlements arena with all its potentials, the opportunities for action (as well as its costs and limits), enabling local action, and priorities for future action. Ms. Alfaro said the group had identified six priority areas where the Habitat Centre could give leadership at the international level. The first involved promoting intersectoral action, as the experts reasoned that much of the potential for promoting sustainable consumption was currently lost due to
traditional systems of decision-making at local levels. Next, they recommended linking technical support with legal and institutional frameworks, as technical support for changing production or consumption patterns still occurred within a legal and institutional vacuum, ignoring the driving forces that encouraged resource depletion and waste.
The group's third recommendation was mobilizing community partnerships, she said. It noted that communities often lacked the capacity to mobilize their full potential for promoting sustainable consumption, while local authorities lacked the skills or incentives to promote local partnerships. Other recommendations were: using local economic instruments, sharing "best practices" experiences, and developing indicators for changing consumption.
Ms. Alfaro pointed out that much work had already been done on indicators as part of the local Agenda 21 process. That could be supplemented by the design of sustainable consumption indicators that met the information needs of households, communities and enterprises.
Mr. Satterthwaite said that one of the notable things about the meeting was the extent to which the assembled experts had agreed on the critical common theme that there was enormous potential to reduce the depletion in national capital while meeting the people's needs and priorities. Although it sounded like a contradiction, he pointed out, all the experts had brought stories and experiences where remarkable improvements in the provision of basic services had been achieved, sometimes with fewer resources, or remarkable reduction in resource use in cities in the North had been achieved with no loss in the quality of life. "There was also the commitment that if you brought the sustainable consumption logic to some of the problems of provision and of reduced consumption, you could actually find some remarkable ways of addressing the problems", he added.
Mr. Sinha said that in the expert group meeting and in the workshop they had held earlier in the day participants had been able to locate the entire question of sustainable consumption in a human settlements context. It had always been discussed in a macroeconomic context. But the question was what could be done to promote its cause at a settlements level. That was the question the group had been attempting to answer in the past three days, and it had made the point that placing the question in a settlement context meant local planning, local action, and local monitoring. It also meant action by a variety of actors, of which the local government may be the leading one, but not the only one.
Another important contribution of the work of the group was that it had recognized that while a lot of work had been done in the recent and not-so- recent past, with regard to sustainable consumption in different sectors, sufficient attention had not been paid to cross-sectoral concerns, he said. The experts had been able to do that, he noted, citing cross-cutting concerns in such areas as equity, efficiency, transparency, partnership and participation, education, and regulation. Those were principles that were
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important no matter the subject that was being examined. The panel had recognized that there was a direct relationship between those general principles and the concern for sustainable consumption patterns.
A further contribution of the panel was the recognition that sustainable consumption could mean different things in different developmental contexts, he said. In the context of the developed world, he pointed out, the main concern was perhaps to put a limit on consumption. In the developing world, on the other hand, people did not consume enough, and it would be cruel and unrealistic to tell them that experts meeting at the United Nations had recommended that they should consume less. For those people, sustainable consumption had to mean rationalization of the present consumption patterns. It was also important to recognize that there was a great deal of loss owing to inefficiency in the administration of natural resources among the people, from production to consumption.
On the issue of non-renewable resources, a correspondent asked what the experts were talking about. What were we running out of?
Answering the question, a member of the expert group, Ashok Gadgil of the Energy and Environment Division, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley, said that there were a number of renewable resources whose renewal rate was exceeded in terms of the rate at which they were harvested. If you were harvesting hardwood from the forest, for example, and the rate of harvesting exceeded the rate of regeneration of the forest, the forest would be killed off.
Asked to address equity issues between developed and developing countries, Mr. Sinha answered that there were differentials in the situation between the two groups of countries. In a society in which people lacked access to bare minimum needs, the principle of equity became more important. In the developed world where those needs had been taken care of, the importance of the principle as one of sustainable consumption was to that extent reduced. A small fraction of the world's population which happened to live in the developed world had access to, and consumed a disproportionate portion of the world's resources. On how the problem was to be addressed, he replied that the group had not examined that subject in great detail, its core concern having been sustainable consumption patterns in a human settlements context, rather than in an international one.
Kalyan Ray, of the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, contributing to the subject, said there were two aspects to the issue of equity: inter-generational and intra-generational. It seemed to him that the question raised was focusing on the intra-generational aspect of equity. The expert meeting had focused on the intra-generational aspect. The general feeling among the experts, however, was that today, the focus was on human settlements and action at local level. Even though the problems were global, they were looking more at local levels of action. Beyond that, there was a
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general consensus that there was need for inter-generational equity within the developing countries themselves as increasingly there were pockets of affluence which were consuming at a pace that was much faster than the national average. He gave the examples of cities, and within them, areas where there were much higher levels of consumption among affluent groups. Although equity was discussed, he explained that it had only been within the local context.
Contributing to the subject, Mr. Satterthwaite pointed out that the panel had recognized that there were limits on consumption for northern countries, specifically high consumers, most of which were based in the North. It had also been recognized that there was tremendous scope for maintaining the quality of life in the North, with a much-reduced level of resource use and waste generation.
A correspondent asked Mr. Satterthwaite to elaborate on examples of how cities were already taking steps towards sustainable consumption, and how such cities could share such information. The expert replied that the best way might be for people to interview the specialists present directly, as they were available in every area of the subject.
He cited the example of a small community in Senegal, which had developed a small sewage system and a very innovative treatment system for waste water, saying such a community would be the advisers to other groups developing similar items. He said that it would be crazy for any specialist to intervene. The same would go for cities, he continued; city authorities that had developed innovative local Agenda 21 needed forums to talk to each other. It was the experts' strong recommendation that there should be support for those links.
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