Environmental groups are pressing President Obama to extend his itinerary from next month's visit to a Group of 20 summit in Mexico and fly from there to the U.N. sustainable development conference a few days later in Brazil.

In a letter sent to the White House yesterday, the Natural Resources Defense Council and 21 other groups said Obama's attendance in Brazil is crucial to send a signal that the United States intends to lead the world in creating green economies.

Obama is set to attend the G-20 heads of government summit in Los Cabos on June 18 and 19 but has made no mention of plans to extend the trip southward to Rio de Janeiro. Rio is host to the U.N. gathering this year known as Rio+20 to commemorate the first Earth Summit there 20 years ago.

Jacob Scherr, director of global strategy and advocacy at NRDC, in a press call yesterday called the Rio summit "one of the most important conferences" from the United Nations in recent memory. He said it will feature more than 50,000 participants and about 130 heads of state, as U.N. officials attempt to shift the tone of environmental gatherings from difficult face-to-face climate change negotiations to a more open-ended approach.

"We believe it is really crucial that the president attend," he said. "It's important for him to go to show that our country is concerned."

The letter was also signed by the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, Greenpeace and others.

The plea comes despite several months of bad press about Rio+20, which has yet to produce an official agenda. Host country Brazil has been called disengaged during preparatory talks in New York, and some key delegations have decided to either skip the meeting altogether or lower the size of their contingent.

Another try at an 'outcome document'

Negotiations at the United Nations over the "outcome document" are set to resume for one more week of meetings next week, in hopes of focusing the conference. The challenge appears to be a case of too many cooks brewing the same stew, with many U.N. member nations looking to advance an overwhelming number of individual ideas (ClimateWire, May 8).

Scherr himself has been critical of the U.N. meetings on Rio, which he attended, but in the press briefing he repeated his pitch that the sustainable development conference is about turning the tables on past meetings and framing a new approach to international environmental talks.

He noted the high number of side events, estimated at 600 by the United Nations, and stressed that Rio+20 is not about negotiating another global climate treaty. It is instead about framing a strategy for implementing past commitments held over from talks in South Africa, Denmark and Mexico, he said.

NRDC and others "are really urging the [Obama] administration to look at it differently," he said. "Our hope is that this would be the first summit in history to produce a cloud of commitments."

Among the hard proposals NRDC is backing with about a month to go until Rio is encouraging private investments in clean energy in the developing world with $500 million in private funds. The group would also like to see a major pact on nations agreeing to phase out fossil fuel subsidies by 2015 and elimination of super greenhouse gas emissions like hydrofluorocarbons.

Brazil intent on 'tackling poverty'

Other proposals possibly on the table include doubling the amount of renewable energy in the developing world, making the U.N. Environment Programme into a World Environment Organization and ending the use of gross domestic product to measure national economic growth.

On climate talks, NRDC's international policy director, Jake Schmidt, said he does not expect hard mandates, but with so many heads of state attending, he finds it hard to believe global warming will not be discussed in some form.

"Anytime you get heads of government around the table, they have to talk about global warming," he said. "That has to be a central part of what they're talking about."

Scherr said he expects the White House to release its own wish list of intended commitments, including a green cities cooperation agreement with Brazil, in the next few weeks. As for whether Obama will attend, the White House has been mum, and Scherr has received no clear signal from aides there.

In the meantime, Brazilian ministers have recently shown signs of coming around to taking Rio seriously. Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota and Minister of Environment Izabella Teixeira issued a document last week that said they would like Rio+20 to step beyond Rio '92 to focus not just on environmental issues but also on poverty eradication and how to improve technology transfer among nations, among other concepts.

"Unlike the Rio '92 meeting, the conference moves beyond a debate focused solely on environment," Teixeira said, adding that "every segment of society is part of this debate, which will concentrate on green economy, sustainability and tackling poverty."

Click here to see Brazil's website dedicated to Rio+20.

Sullivan is based in New York.