THE Earth Summit in Johannesburg is costing millions of pounds to stage and is being attended by representatives and leaders from every nation.

It is intended that the talks will cure the ills of the world, but what does it mean to people in Bolton? Frank Elson investigates.

SOMEWHERE in the world a child dies every eight seconds from drinking contaminated water. The lack of safe drinking water in the world is just one reason why world governments and other organisations have got together in South Africa for another United Nations Conference on Environment and Development -- what most people now call an Earth Summit.

As the human population continues to grow, the problem of availability of adequate supplies of safe drinking water is projected to worsen. More children die, so in some parts of the world they have more babies -- but this means that even more children will die. A truly vicious circle.

Moving nearer to home we find that Britain has had too much water.

Frank Kennedy, North-west regional organiser for the Friends of the Earth, said: "While floods have not affected Bolton as much as some areas, the impact on insurance premiums will affect us all -- and those floods are the result of global warming, which the Earth Summit could do something about."

So what IS the Earth Summit all about?

As the idea of the world as a "Global Village" spread throughout the 1980s, so governments began to understand that poverty, pollution and lack of healthy living was just as much a global problem as finding a universally acceptable name for a household washing liquid.

So it was that in 1992 the first "Earth Summit" took place in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

The aim of the summit was to get the nations of the world together, to come up with internationally acceptable -- and workable -- policies that would eliminate poverty, and pollution and the disease and deaths arising from them.

Inevitably, at a time when global warming was on every politician's lips, the Rio Summit seemed to do nothing but discuss ways of cutting down on ozone-depleting pollution.

Just five years later, Earth Summit Two took place in New York.

Again, the emphasis was on pollution and governments everywhere were able to point to the progress they had made.

In the case of the United Kingdom, this "progress" consisted of piecemeal tax penalties on petrol, both at the pump and via company taxation, and Government-inspired limits for local councils on air quality -- Bolton included -- that could hardly be met even if they banned every motor vehicle from the roads.

Mr Kennedy said: "Although it appears at the moment that many of the major countries in Johannesburg are opposing targets for reductions in pollution, we say that this is exactly where a town like Bolton can make improvements.

"Nationally, planning decisions taken since the 1950s have taken the view that everyone would get around by car.

"This needs to be turned completely around. Planning should favour town centre development, where there is an incentive to travel by public transport, and be against out-of-town development where the only way to travel is by car.

"Again, in a town like Bolton, the biggest employers will be the council and the health service, and they must take the lead in cutting down the use of power.

"We have to stop heating the sky. Targets from the Earth Summit would pinpoint that. Power stations are needed to heat and power Bolton, but wind farms on local hill farms could cut down on oil-powered power stations.

"Again, this type of decision taken at the Earth Summit could filter its way into Bolton's day-to-day living."

The Earth Summit does have a large agenda and it does get a lot of work done, of course.

For instance, agreement has been made on international co-operation to halt the decline in fisheries around the world. And a meeting of judges from dozens of countries is close to an agreement on a global judicial policy for upholding environmental laws.

"The main thing is that governments must agree that they have to govern. At the moment, governments have handed control over to major multinational corporations who are answerable only to their shareholders," said Mr Kennedy.

EARTH SUMMIT WEBWATCH

www.johannesburgsummit.org

The official United Nations website for Earth Summit 2002.

www.earthsummitwatch.org

Earth Summit Watch is a unique citizens' initiative to monitor and encourage actions by each national government to implement the promises made at Earth Summits.

www.greenpeace.org

The website of the famous environmental campaigning organisation. Lots of news and views of the Earth Summit.