PARIS, France (AFP) — The biggest attempt to tackle the Earth’s worsening environment problems and help the planet’s poorest, gets underway in less than two weeks, but already the prospect of failure hangs over the Johannesburg summit.

Wrangling over textual nuances, squabbling over financial commitments and a doctrinal row between Europe and Washington could hollow out the summit, transforming the second Earth Summit into a ludicrous exercise in hot air.

“Johannesburg should be the opportunity for a decisive change of direction,” says Crispin Tickell, director of the Green College Centre for Environmental Policy and Understanding at Oxford University.

“(But) so far the progress has been unsatisfactory, and the prospects… do not look good.”

Between 40,000 and 60,000 people are scheduled to attend the August 26-September 4 meeting, whose last three days will climax with a summit of heads of state or government.

The gathering is a 10-year follow-up to the fabled Earth Summit on sustainable development at Rio de Janeiro.

Trumpeted as mankind’s new dawn, the Rio Summit gave birth to an array of agreements on staving off climate change, preserving biodiversity and curbing pollutant chemicals that linger in the environment for decades.

A decade down the track, none of these accords has been implemented.

And the most important of them — the Kyoto Protocol on global warming — has been almost gutted by the astonishingly complex rulebook that took almost four years to negotiate. It has also been snubbed by the United States, the worst carbon polluter of all.

Agenda 21, the “action programme” of 2,500 proposals on sustainable development set down in Rio, has been a bible that has gathered dust on bureaucrats’ shelves.

In the meantime, a mountain of evidence, from UN agencies, scientists and credible environment groups, highlights the effects of man’s parasitic use of the Earth.

The charges range from species extinction, soil erosion by intensive farming and water depletion to overfishing, rampant destruction of tropical forests, worsening air and sea pollution and urban sprawl.

“Humans are as qualified to be stewards (of the Earth) as goats are to be gardeners,” says the conservation pioneer, James Lovelock.

Johannesburg will seek to put Agenda 21 back on track and also push ahead with another lofty goal, set down at the UN’s Millennium Summit, to halve the number of poor and hungry by 2015 and boost access to clean water and power.

How to achieve this is, of course, the big problem, for the New Age generosity that prevailed in Rio has melted like an alpine glacier faced with atmospheric warming.

“At discussions on global finance and the economy, the environment is still treated as an unwelcome guest,” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said last month.

US President George W Bush’s administration is opposing all attempts for anything other than voluntary, rather than binding, summit text on matters such as aid and incentives for alternative energy.

In Rio, rich countries pledged to contribute 0.7 per cent of their gross national product (GNP) in development aid. Today, the European Union’s share remains under half of that — 0.33 per cent of GNP — while that of the United States is a mere 0.11 per cent. The wealthy nations club, the OECD, spends six times more on farming subsidies than it does on development assistance.

Non-government groups are holding their own “Global Forum”, from August 19 to September 4, where criticism of the wealthy West will be fierce.

“The decisions (at Johannesburg) must yield clean air, clean water, renewable energy and a healthier environment, not rhetoric,” says Marcelo Furtado of Greenpeace International.