AROUND twenty years ago, the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), popularly known as the “Earth Summit,” took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It gathered over a hundred heads of states. The conference produced several important outcomes: the Rio
Declaration which contains a declaration of principles on the environment and development, the Agenda 21 which is a 40-chapter document that outlines a blue print on implementing sustainable development, the Forest Principles, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The UNCED itself was a product of several years of discussion and negotiations that can be traced way back to 1972 when the UN Conference on Human Environment was convened in Stockholm and 1987 when Brundtland Report (Our Common Future) was pub-lishesd. The Brundtland Report defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
The Stockholm conference itself spawned the UN Environment Program (UNEP) and other multilateral environmental agreements but it was in Rio that member states affirmed sustainable development that integrates economic and social development with environment protection.
Twenty years down the road from Rio, we still face chronic poverty and underdevelopment in the world and the world we inherited is now teetering on the edge of climate disaster. In 2005, according to the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, humans have changed our world over the past 50 years more than anytime in our history, and this has resulted in a “substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.” During the four decades since Stockholm (1970-2004), carbon dioxide emissions rose by 70 percent according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The principles set in 1992 will again be revisited this coming June. Dubbed as Rio+20, governments are called to sit together at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development to be held again in Rio. The conference will address three objectives: a) securing renewed political commitment to sustainable development; b) assessing progress toward internationally agreed goals on sustainable development; and c) addressing new and emerging issues. These together with two themes on the Green Economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication and the Institutional Framework for sustainable development will be the subject of intense study and discussion in meetings in the six months or so until June.
The first of these meetings is already underway at the United Nations in New York to deliberate on what is now known as the Zero Draft. The Zero Draft is a distillation of around 6,500 documents submitted to the UN from governments and civil society groups. It is the starting document for reference in the negotiations (hence the name Zero draft). As the UN is made up of governments, the negotiations involve mainly official delegations from states. Civil society, NGOs and social movements participate in varying degrees at the sides or through well defined procedures for .intervention in the formal process.
While there is a lot to be said about the language and content of the Zero Draft, one notices the lack of introspection and analysis on why the original sustainable development framework has not worked as envisioned. The conference evades facing head on the probleem of neoliberal globalization and carefully avoids trampling on trade issues as it proposes the Green Economy. Without an acknowledgement of the roots of overproduction, we might be repeating more of the same even as one tries to avoid “business as usual” by advocating low carbon technologies and investment strategies that focus more on enhancing natural capital rather than depleting it.
In the Green Economy, markets, finance capital and labor remain as they were in the current “brown” economy according to Ibon International. It will not deliver enough on poverty eradication and would drive a wider wedge between have and have-nots within and between countries. As the Zero Draft evolves to a final document for June, we fear that if these challenges remain then Rio+20 will only entrain the same unsustainable globalization policies that caused environmental destruction in the first place albeit in a new language of the Green Economic policy agenda.
Yet as social movements and the people move to demand a drastic reconfiguration of society, there is that space to make enough states listen to their poor and vulnerable sectors and look back at the original ideas of Rio and push the agenda of genuine development forward.
Declaration which contains a declaration of principles on the environment and development, the Agenda 21 which is a 40-chapter document that outlines a blue print on implementing sustainable development, the Forest Principles, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The UNCED itself was a product of several years of discussion and negotiations that can be traced way back to 1972 when the UN Conference on Human Environment was convened in Stockholm and 1987 when Brundtland Report (Our Common Future) was pub-lishesd. The Brundtland Report defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
The Stockholm conference itself spawned the UN Environment Program (UNEP) and other multilateral environmental agreements but it was in Rio that member states affirmed sustainable development that integrates economic and social development with environment protection.
Twenty years down the road from Rio, we still face chronic poverty and underdevelopment in the world and the world we inherited is now teetering on the edge of climate disaster. In 2005, according to the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, humans have changed our world over the past 50 years more than anytime in our history, and this has resulted in a “substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.” During the four decades since Stockholm (1970-2004), carbon dioxide emissions rose by 70 percent according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The principles set in 1992 will again be revisited this coming June. Dubbed as Rio+20, governments are called to sit together at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development to be held again in Rio. The conference will address three objectives: a) securing renewed political commitment to sustainable development; b) assessing progress toward internationally agreed goals on sustainable development; and c) addressing new and emerging issues. These together with two themes on the Green Economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication and the Institutional Framework for sustainable development will be the subject of intense study and discussion in meetings in the six months or so until June.
The first of these meetings is already underway at the United Nations in New York to deliberate on what is now known as the Zero Draft. The Zero Draft is a distillation of around 6,500 documents submitted to the UN from governments and civil society groups. It is the starting document for reference in the negotiations (hence the name Zero draft). As the UN is made up of governments, the negotiations involve mainly official delegations from states. Civil society, NGOs and social movements participate in varying degrees at the sides or through well defined procedures for .intervention in the formal process.
While there is a lot to be said about the language and content of the Zero Draft, one notices the lack of introspection and analysis on why the original sustainable development framework has not worked as envisioned. The conference evades facing head on the probleem of neoliberal globalization and carefully avoids trampling on trade issues as it proposes the Green Economy. Without an acknowledgement of the roots of overproduction, we might be repeating more of the same even as one tries to avoid “business as usual” by advocating low carbon technologies and investment strategies that focus more on enhancing natural capital rather than depleting it.
In the Green Economy, markets, finance capital and labor remain as they were in the current “brown” economy according to Ibon International. It will not deliver enough on poverty eradication and would drive a wider wedge between have and have-nots within and between countries. As the Zero Draft evolves to a final document for June, we fear that if these challenges remain then Rio+20 will only entrain the same unsustainable globalization policies that caused environmental destruction in the first place albeit in a new language of the Green Economic policy agenda.
Yet as social movements and the people move to demand a drastic reconfiguration of society, there is that space to make enough states listen to their poor and vulnerable sectors and look back at the original ideas of Rio and push the agenda of genuine development forward.
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