Delegates will dine on fresh lobster and champagne and stay at some of the smartest hotels in the world. The views over the surrounding city will be spectacular as they are ferried by limousine to and from a myriad of meetings.
But yesterday the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be held in South Africa at the end of August, was facing ridicule because of the sheer enormity of the operation which will be staged next door to the poverty of the black townships of Alexandra and Soweto.

The first ever 'mega-summit' will be the largest single meeting organised by the UN, with 65,000 delegates from around the world. It is costing the South African authorities 551 million rand (£40 million) to stage.

Every hotel in Johannesburg has been booked and leave for thousands of police and army personnel cancelled. The hotels include some of the smartest on the continent - the Westcliff, complete with marble bathrooms, the Park Hyatt and the Sandton Sun and Towers.

Local residents are offering to rent out their apartments for 2,800 rand (£190) a night, equivalent to a month's mortgage repayment.

Nearly 200 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) will be represented, with interests ranging from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Network Earth Village to the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable and the Lawyers Environmental Action Team.

New roads are being built into the smart Johannesburg suburb of Sandton where the summit will be held. Residents of the city are bracing themselves for 10 days of nightmarish disruption.

'Imagine what all the pollution will be from the planeloads arriving for it,' said Caroline Spelman, the Shadow International Development Secretary. 'I'll be doing my little bit and not going.

'Of course, it's easy to carp and summits are important but this is certainly excessive. You surely don't need such a massive jamboree to achieve change.'

The Sandton Convention Centre will host discussions on how to use the world's resources in a more environmentally friendly manner.

More than 20,000 UN delegates will attend, with 45,000 connected delegates taking part in a Civil Society Forum which will run as part of the summit. More than 5,000 journalists will be there and 300 'information officers'.

The Johannesburg World Summit Company has been set up by the South African government to organise the event which has taken on the magnitude of staging an Olympic Games. Already 5,000 student volunteers have been hired to try to ensure the event runs smoothly.

Particularly embarrassing for the UN is that Sandton, a nearly all-white suburb, is near the sprawling poverty of Alexandra and Soweto, where black South Africans live amid some of the poorest conditions in the country.

Last year Alexandra hit the headlines when police evicted residents from the banks of the Jukskei River which runs through the area. A cholera outbreak was threatening to kill hundreds and the government said that people had to be moved.

News of the size of the sustainability summit comes a few days after it was revealed that Britain was sending up to 30 civil servants to Bali in Indonesia for the final preparatory talks before the summit. More than 5,000 delegates from around the world will attend next week, making the 'pre-conference' meeting a large-scale event in itself.

The Johannesburg summit is being organised to mark the tenth anniversary of the end of the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Environmental groups say that many of the goals that were set at the Rio summit have yet to be met.

'One of the key targets was for industrial nations to spend 0.7 per cent of their GDP on overseas development assistance,' said Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth. 'We are nowhere near hitting that target.'

Juniper said he feared that the South Africa summit would simply produce another set of 'vague' and 'watered-down' proposals which many developed world countries would do their best to ignore.