Road logs Rio+20

By Gustavo Marin There have already been a good deal of post-Rio+20 articles. A large majority of them have expressed discontentment, disappointment, the evidence of failure foretold, the inadequacy of the governments’ final declaration, etc. Some of these articles, digging deeper, have not stopped at establishing that the governments were not able to reach an [...]

By Jan-Gustav Strandenaes, Stakeholder Forum IFSD – the Institutional Framework for Sustainable Development – and good governance came out of Rio+20 strengthened. As one of the main agenda-points it enjoys an entire section in the Outcome Document, ‘The Future We Want’. References to governance are interspersed throughout the document and already in paragraph 10, in [...]

By Derek Osborn, Stakeholder Forum Early in 2012, Stakeholder Forum in collaboration with several other civil society organisations in the UK drew up a checklist of 13 key objectives that we hoped to see achieved at Rio+20. In the following scorecard I have tried to assess how far the Rio+20 Outcome Document measured up to [...]

By World Watch Institute “The Rio conference is over before it has even started.” This was a common reaction among many participants and observers at Rio+20, following the release of what became the final conference agreement, The Future We Want, by the Brazilian hosts three days before the end of the gathering. This happened even [...]

By Iddri What has come out of Rio+20? A sense of realism, certainly. While the final text does not match up to the challenges at stake, it is a relatively true reflection of the current state of play in international cooperation, and reveals the limits of the multilateral cooperation system inherited from 1946. Indeed, globalisation [...]

By George Monbiot It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth’s living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who [...]

By José Pedro Martins “We need — with worldwide mobilization — to fight for complete reform of socio-environmental governance, because the current one doesn’t correspond at all to the interests of communities around the globe and of Mother Earth.” That’s how Ailton Krenak, one of the best known indigenous leaders in Brazil and member of [...]

By Peter Utting is Deputy Director of UNRISD. This viewpoint reflects on the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), known as Rio+20, held in June. It looks at, among other things, the reactions to the idea of green economy, one of the conference’s main themes; the role of corporations; and the positioning of equity [...]

By Martin Khor The Rio+20 summit from 13 to 22 June was disappointing to many, but it could still succeed through the mandated follow-up actions. The South Centre’s Executive Director gives an in-depth assessment. The UN Conference on Sustainable Development, more popularly known as Rio+20, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit, [...]

By ETC Group Governments mark 50 years of failure…and a couple of nano-steps forward For a lot of the world, ‘Rio+20’ signifies the big environmental jamboree taking place this week in Brazil – before the Olympics and after the Queen’s Jubilee. For the thousands of negotiators and civil society observers, including ETC Group, who have [...]

By David Disckson, Sciences and Development. Last week’s summit has confirmed that sustainable development will only be achieved through the political leadership of developing countries. Two and a half years ago, the Copenhagen climate change conference (COP15) ended in rancorous and highly public disagreement between developed and developing nations on what was needed to prevent [...]

By Richard Black, BBC News. The UN sustainable development summit in Brazil has ended with world leaders adopting a political declaration hammered out a few days previously. Environment and development charities say the Rio+20 agreement is too weak to tackle social and environmental crises. Gro Harlem Brundtland, author of a major UN sustainable development report [...]

By Mario Osava, IPS. The Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) in Istanbul in 1996 was one of the international meetings most open to civil society participation. Its conclusions, published as a voluminous Plan of Action, collected thousands of proposals and recommendations from participants. But Jaime Lerner, the urban planner who decades [...]

By Patrick Bond Given the worsening world economic crisis, the turn to ‘Green Economy’ rhetoric looms as a potential saviour for footloose financial capital, and is also enormously welcome to those corporations panicking at market chaos in the topsy-turvy fossil-fuel, water, infrastructure construction, technology and agriculture sectors. On the other hand, for everyone else, the [...]

By Vandana Shiva, The Asian Age. Rio de Janeiro is a city of U-turns. The most frequent road sign in the city is “Retorno” — return. And Rio+20 or the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development followed that pattern. It was a great U-turn in terms of human responsibility towards protecting the life-sustaining processes of [...]

By The Elders Today The Elders said that the declaration of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) is not the response we need to safeguard people and the planet. Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and Chair of the UN commission that brought the concept of sustainable development to global attention 25 [...]

By Rio plus twenties Rio+20 was exactly what I predicted a long time before: Public opinion shifted to call it a “lost opportunity”. It did not find any responses to (not even properly deal with) the biggest global challenges, such as climate change, the continued loss of biological diversity and the increasing gap between rich [...]

By Rio plus twenties What we would do if Rio+20 fails? Despite the negative pessimist nature of the question, Rio+20 will be a success in many ways. We will still be young people the morning after the summit; we will still care about the same issues that drove us to Rio de Janeiro; and if [...]

By UN-GLS The UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD or “Rio+20”) opened 20 June 2012, gathering 191 UN Member States and observers, including 79 Heads of State and government, about 10,000 representatives of Major Groups, and more than 30,000 other participants (parliamentarians, mayors, UN officials, chief executive officers, etc). Its outcome document – entitled “The [...]

By Leonardo Boff Rio+20 has provoked a wide debate about ecological issues. Since not everyone understands the technical terms of the debate, we are publishing an article by the best known ecologist of the State of Rio, Arthur Soffiati, of Campos de Goytacazes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, founder of the Centro Norte Fluminense for the [...]