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Forum EKS
Engineering the Knowledge Society
Geneva
12th December 2003
« Sustainable Development and
Information Society,
from Rio to Geneva »
René LONGET,
President of equiterre
Parter for sustainable development, Geneva-Zurich
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• Citizenship needs and means acces to
information, ability to deal with information
• Thus Information is a very important issue
– 1) Information means knowledge
– 2) Information means capacity to understand
what happens
– 3) Information means freedom from false
believings, means more selfconfidence.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• More information technology gives not
automatically more and better information.
– Information technology can enable ignorant people to
come to awareness
– Information technology can make that isolated people
get connected
– Information technology can enable a society to better
fact finding and so to monitor its own development
– But no one of this important goals will become reality
without a serious effort and a strong political will. The
technology alone will not achieve this by herself.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• The information technology:
–
–
–
–
Is relatively cheap
Is not complicated to handle with
Is very supple
It is much more difficult for a censorship to combat
Internet publications than to close traditional edited
newspapers (examples: Iran. Zimbabwe, China...)
– The information technology helps to build up the civil
society and citizenship specially in the Third World.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• If information technology means no limit to
communication,
–
–
–
How stop the invasion of indesirable e-mails?
How combat racist, pornographic, violent messages?
How eliminate paedophile webpages?
– Without eliminate the freedom of exchange
political opinions and scientific - and other informations through all the world wide net?
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• The information technology can enable people to become
better informated, enable governments and civil society
organizations to get a better monitoring of the development
of their country or city
• But what’s the message passing through the new opened
channels?
– We can suggest in the Third World, through the global soap-operaprogramms diffused by the most TV channels, that people in the
industrialized world are all rich, lazy, whit big cars, big swimmingpools and plenty of beautyful girls around them…
– And enclose the people in all the world in a virtual reality that will
substitute to the real world and undermine the will to change it.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• The lesson of all this is that never a new
technology is able to give us social, ethical or
human progress without a good social, ethical and
human accompaniment.
• This is the real issue, not only to deal with the so-called
digital divide, but to assure that the information
technologies will help to improve our societies and our
lives.
• The accompaniment is also of eminent importance in the
field of environnemental issues.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• Environmental issues of the wide spread of
technologies of information:
– Materials (poisonous for the environment, perhaps also
for men, if misused or abandoned without treatment)
– Ability to be repaired
– Ability of its components to be recycled
– Is there an life-cycle approach in the branch?
– Which amount of toxic or not toxic waste?
– Which increasing of the global energy consumption?
What origin of this energy, specially in the Third
World?
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• To assure the goals of sustainable development, we need a better
information capacity
• To have a better information capacity we need to use the information
technology in a certain sense.
• This should be the goal of the Summit on Information Society now
held in Geneva.
• To this purpose it is of great importance that this Summit made the link
to the other Summits of the UN in the Nineties and the beginning of
this Century: Habitat, Social Summit, Alimentation, Rights of Women,
Development, Millenium, etc. The UN should not separate the results
of all these Summits and unite them in a global view.
• This view exists, it is the view of Sustainable Development, as
reassigned at the WSSD at Johannesburg 2002.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• Sustainable Development means to face the real needs of
our world.
• What’s going on in the real world today?
• Globalisation divides as well unites us
• The most important of our time issues are:
– Guarantee of Human rights all over the world
– Assuring of peace and coexistence between different cultures
– Implementing of a sustainable way of Development all over the
world.
– All our technical means should be employed to realize these goals.
• This is naturally also true for the information technologies.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• What aims Sustainability?
• The most importants goals as noted in the Action
Plan adopted at Johannesburg the 4th of
September 2002:
– Eradication of poverty
– Changing of our ordinary patterns of production and
consumption
– Managing the natural resources basis of social and
economic development.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
– Sustainability:
– Answers simulteanously to the issues of poverty,
inequal development and misuse of natural resources
– Defined in 1987 (Brundtland-Report of the UN, entitled
Our commun Future)
– Recognized internationally by all States, organisms of
the civil society, business, the UN, in Rio 1992
(UNCED)
– Reinforced 2002 in Johannesburg.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• Some social goals of the WSSD:
• Halve by 2015 the proportion of people
– whose income is less than 1 $ a day
– Who suffer from hunger
– Whitout acces to safe drinking water
– Who not have access to basic sanitation
• Ensure that children - boys and girls - will be able to
a full course of primary schooling
• Increase employment opportunities taking into
account the fundamental rights at work
• By 2020 achieve a sugnificant improvement in the
lives of slum dwellers.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• Some environmental goals of the WSSD:
– Promote sustainable consumption and production
patterns
– Support of regional and national initiatives to accelerate
this purpose
– Delinking economic growth and environmental
degradation through improving efficiency in the use of
ressources and production processes (life-cycle analysis,
polluter-pays-principle, consumer and producer information,
increasing of eco-efficiency, support of cleaner production,
improve social and environmental performances of business,
encourage dialogue between enterprises and their stakeholders, use
environmental impactForum
assessment
procedures).
EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• 20% of all inhabitants of
the World use 45% of
animal proteins, 58% of
the energy, 84% of the
paper, 88% of the
vehicles.
• USA: 3% of the global
population, 25% of the
global energy
consumption.
• In Johannesburg,
commitments were made:
– Integrate energy efficacity and
acessibilitxy into development
programs
– With a sense of urgency
substantially increase the
global share of renewable
energy
– Reduce greenhouse gaz
emissions
– Implement transport strategies
in the sense of sustainability.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
•
•
•
•
•
850 millions of human beings suffer from hunger
850 millions are analphabets.
1 billion have an income less than 1 $ per day.
1 billion are without an acceptable housing.
1,1 billion are without acces to water of drinking quality.
• 2,4 billions have no acces to basic sanitation facilities.
• We, the developed world and its technology, have
the duty to assure a human development all over
the world and the basic conditions of human
dignity.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• We must develop but not in the way we do this now, since
the 19th and more the 20th century we are on the wrong
way:
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–
–
–
–
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The oceans are overfished and many fish stocks are depleted
The climate change has obviously began
The threat over the non renewelable resources is real
The loss of biodiversity, and of the tropical forests is going on
Desertification is also going on
Pollution of atmosphere, water and soils is also a reality.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• Within the last 50 years, the fossil energy
consumption has been multiplied by 5 and the
greenhouse gaz emissions have followed the same
way.
• But we notice extreme differences between the
regions of our world:
– 20 to/y/person in the USA, 10 in Germany, 4 in
Mexico, 1,5 in Brazil, the quantities are much
smaller in Asia and Africa
– Acceptable level: 1 to/y/person.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
•Other environmental commitments taken in
Johannesburg:
– Prevent and minimize waste and maximise reuse
– Sound management of chemicals though their life cycle
– Protect freshwaters and introduce a sound management of the
seas inclusive sustainable fisheries
– Facilitate the protection of the ozone layer
– Promote sustainable agriculture, land use, mining and forestry
– Achieve by 2010 a significant reverse in the loss of
biological diversity.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003
Sustainable Development and Information Society
• Sustainability and information society in the WSSD Action
Plan
– In many paragraphs of the Plan we find the necessity of
information to assure monitoring, and good governance.
– The Action Plan reassures that nothing is possible without the field
work of scientists, the gathering of informations, the diffusion of
the collected knomwledge about the state of sustainability.
– But we have to underline that the information technologies have to
be used to enforce sustainable development and to assure that the
are not misused in the other way.
– The should help in monitoring situations and in return in
mobililizing people in direction of good solutions.
– This should be the goal of the present Summit.
Forum EKS 12.12.2003