UNITED NATIONS -- Stalled negotiations over an outcome document meant to frame the agenda during this week's U.N. sustainable development conference in Rio de Janeiro forced host nation Brazil to introduce its own proposal over the weekend, but activists immediately branded the new text as unlikely to produce a breakthrough.

Brazil had to step in with its own agenda document after months of failed negotiations by U.N. diplomats. What had been a tight, 19-page proposal months ago ballooned to 200 pages of text and shrank more recently to about 80 pages.

In stepped Brazil with a 50-page version that stripped many of the big-picture concepts favored by activists, such as ending fossil fuel subsidies, setting up a $30 billion development fund for developing nations and enabling easy technology transfer between countries.

"We see a lopsided victory of weak words over action words, with the weak words winning out at 514 to 10," said Lasse Gustavsson, head of the World Wildlife Fund's delegation in Rio. "The negotiating text is peppered throughout with words like 'support,' 'encourage' and 'promote,' and is very short on strong language like 'must' and 'will.'"

Members of Avaaz and 350.org spread a giant trillion-dollar bill over Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana beach. The groups are asking world leaders at the Rio+20 Summit to end fossil fuel incentives in favor of alternatives. Photo courtesy of Avaaz.

One example is the text on living up to the ambitious international treaties first sparked at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The document acknowledges "uneven progress" since the promise of that summit and stresses "the need to accelerate progress in closing development gaps between developed and developing countries," but it does not promote hard commitments toward doing so in areas like climate change.

Instead, it calls for "continued and strengthened international cooperation, particularly in the areas of finance, debt, trade and technology transfer." That nuanced rhetoric is typical of the text.

The proposal also picks up on a theme from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has lately been calling on delegates to put aside hard specifics in favor of broadly worded "sustainable development goals," or SDGs, that would be modeled on the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. Brazil's lead negotiator at the summit, Ambassador Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado, in press briefings over the weekend said the SDGs are likely to pass by week's end, which he heralded as a "very significant" step for international cooperation.

Figueiredo also expressed hope that work could be completed on regulating fisheries on the high seas as well as beefing up authority at the U.N. Environmental Programme.

But environmentalists gathered in Rio by the thousands were not impressed and issued press release after press release urging the parties to take up real ideas over lofty rhetoric.

"The text is neither ambitious enough nor delivers the required political will needed to fix our broken planet," said Asad Rehman, head of international climate at Friends of the Earth.

International leaders were just as unimpressed. Former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who is involved with an international climate change task force, issued a statement warning that Rio could become irrelevant because it will produce no hard mandates on warming.

"It looks like there is backsliding on this issue and that worries me so much because without addressing climate change, all of the other problems and tasks that will be set by the final document ... will not be accomplished and will become meaningless," he said.

U.S. envoy balks

According to Chee Yoke Ling, director of Third World Network, talks over the weekend on the new text hit a snag almost immediately when the U.S. envoy for climate change, Todd Stern, said the United States was "disturbed" that the words "common but differentiated responsibilities" (CBDR) between developing and developed nations were sprinkled throughout the document.

"Stern said that the paradigm of the CBDR is a non-starter and 'certainly crosses a red line for us,'" Ling reported in an update from Rio on yesterday's talks.

Brazilian negotiators responded that CBDR "is a question of stock and flow" in reference to the notion that wealthier countries should be held responsible for greenhouse gas accumulations (stock) while helping to deal with new emissions (flow) from poor nations. Ling in her analysis noted that Stern's position is reflective of the U.S. move to remove CBDR as an operating principle in separate international climate talks.

In a press briefing, Stern said that the phrase "common but differentiated" as a firewall between developed and developing economies "is completely unacceptable to us."

"If it ever made sense, it doesn't make sense anymore in the context of a world that is so dynamically and rapidly evolving, and where some of the biggest economies and biggest users of resources -- in the climate change world, biggest producer of greenhouse gases -- and so forth, is on the developing country side of the line," Stern told reporters.

Stern was also asked why President Obama had decided not to attend the Rio summit and whether that was evidence that the United States is not taking the talks seriously. Stern responded that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will attend later this week.

"I am not able to speak to the president's schedule, but we are coming at a level which is quite comparable to a great many other countries," he said.

Voluntary actions

With negotiations stalled, much of the action in Rio appears likely to emerge from voluntary commitments.

Several private-sector announcements were made during the conference's Corporate Sustainability Forum. According to a U.N. release, retailer H&M pledged to procure 100 percent of its cotton from more sustainable sources by 2020, DuPont Co. said it will introduce 4,000 new products to increase food production, and Procter & Gamble Co. set goals for cutting use of petroleum-based materials and encouraging cold-water laundering.

Elsewhere, the World Resources Institute and the British Embassy announced a two-year pilot program to measure corporate and farm-level emissions in Brazil.

The project, based on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, will develop greenhouse gas accounting guidance for Brazil's agriculture sector, "filling an important gap, since Brazil does not presently have a methodology for corporate and farm-level accounting, reporting and monitoring," a press release from WRI said.

More than 90 Brazilian companies voluntarily report their corporate emissions through the Brazilian Greenhouse Gas Protocol Program, WRI said.

More voluntary agreements are expected throughout the week.