The United Nation's World Summit on Sustainable Development, which begins in three months in Johannesburg, has been touted as the biggest, most important environmental gathering ever, the one that will produce a solid plan to save the planet.
It has also quietly been dubbed a dead duck even by those who badly want it to succeed. That's because hardly any world leaders are slated to attend so far, a sign that has observers wondering whether the worsening state of the environment has slipped under the international political radar screen.
The concerns are so sharp that some summit strategists are engaged these days in an anxious counting game. Their question: Just how many world leaders must Johannesburg attract to be technically called a summit?
So far, only a single leader from outside the host country of South Africa has officially pledged to attend -- Britain's Tony Blair.
By contrast, three months before the UN's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which is the parent of the Johannesburg Summit, more than 100 leaders had pledged publicly to attend, Yolanda Kakabadse, now the president of the World Conservation Union, said in a recent interview. In 1992, she was a key co-ordinator for the Earth Summit.
She added that the organizers refused to call the Rio meeting a summit until they had passed the magic number of 100 heads of state or government. In the end, the Rio meeting attracted about 130, plus about 30,000 other participants, produced a raft of international treaties and ended up being seen as a force that galvanized the public understanding of the the planet's environmental problems.
Nitin Desai, the secretary-general of the Johannesburg Summit, leaped to its defence yesterday from his hotel room in Bali, where he is about to launch its final preparatory session. He acknowledged a "sense of nervousness" over the summit's success, but said that's normal for an international event of this magnitude.
He said he expects the coming 10 days of preparatory negotiations to turn out a working paper that will create international support.
"Certainly, if we run into major difficulty in Bali, I would revise my view," he said.
He said that participants had become more hopeful over the past few weeks.
"I sense a distinct change of atmosphere, of mood," he said.
The Johannesburg Summit, known as Rio+10, was designed as a feet-to-the-fire 10-year anniversary, a forum to kick-start the brave promises of Rio by focusing on sustainable development: using the Earth's natural resources in a way that will make sure they last over time. The summit's written literature boasts that it will attract 65,000 participants, including 150 world leaders.
But there are fears that instead of a triumphant reprise, the meeting will prove that the planet's powerful northern governments are simply not interested in the environment even as degradation in the south worsens.
Last week, a swat team of fixers held an emergency meeting in South Africa on how to salvage the summit. They are pinning their hopes on the 10-day session of preparatory talks starting in Bali. If these fail, the fears are that as few as 20,000 participants and only a handful of world powers will go to Johannesburg.
There are other signs of worry. Last month, the European Union's Environment Commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, openly warned that the Johannesburg Summit was on the brink of failure. That followed a session of preparatory talks in New York that failed to produce a working document.
A few days later, a raft of Hollywood stars including Susan Sarandon and Kevin Bacon held a press conference in the United States to urge world leaders to declare that they would attend the summit.
And last week, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, apparently aghast at the idea that Johannesburg might disintegrate into a clone of the UN's disastrous Durban conference on racism, took time out from his hectic schedule of peace negotiations to write a major speech on the summit, effectively pleading with world leaders to put it on their calendars.
Ms. Kakabadse of the World Conservation Union said the actions of world leaders such as Prime Minister Jean Chrétien are not helping matters. Mr. Chrétien has declared that the G8 meeting in Kananaskis, Alta., next month will not focus on sustainable development, but on poverty.
To Ms. Kakabadse, the two are connected, with poverty often a direct result of using the Earth's resources in a way that cannot last.
"Poverty is not something that comes down in a parachute," she said, adding that some world leaders are "trying to delegitimize the concept of sustainable development. It's denial of the real issues."
Mr. Chrétien has not announced whether he will attend the Johannesburg Summit.
U.S. President George W. Bush is unlikely to go, especially because the summit was originally set to finish on Sept. 11, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
The summit has been pushed forward a week and will now end on Sept. 4, but cynics expect that Mr. Bush will not want to take away from the popularity boost expected from the anniversary by attending a summit on a topic he dislikes.
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