How useful has the global process for building the water agenda for Rio been?
Answers
The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Earth Summit, established the need for a Global Ocean Observing System and called upon the IOC to implement the GOOS. The Earth Summit, the major United Nations Conference on global environment to date, took place in Rio de Janeiro from 3 June to 14 June 1992. Government officials from 178 countries and between 20,000 and 30,000 individuals from governments, non-governmental organizations, and the media participated.
The Conference's search for solutions of global problems such as poverty, war, and the growing gap between industrialized and developing countries, was to set the stage for twenty years of environmental diplomacy. The Conference's impact was to rethink economic development in a way that would benefit the Earth and its inhabitants for generations to come.
The Rio Summit meeting strongly called for a change in unsustainable behaviours and warned the world that excessive consumption of resources was putting a stress on the environment. The meeting developed the idea of "sustainable development", a revolutionary concept crafted earlier by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987. The global plan of action for sustainable development, Agenda 21, was adopted.
The Rio Summit, in addition to Agenda 21 and its related conventions on climate change, biodiversity and desertification, has prompted a wide range of action that includes the Commission on Sustainable Development, a Millennium Development Goal explicitly devoted to environmental sustainability, and the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2002 in Johannesburg with its own comprehensive action plan.
In 1992, countries agreed on the landmark Agenda 21, the blueprint for sustainable development. Ten years later, in 2002, countries met again at the world summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg to agree on an implementation plan. The implementation-focused summit in Johannesburg did not produce a particularly strong outcome, rather it laid the groundwork and paved the way for action. In the following months and years commitments were made not only by governments, but also by NGOs, intergovernmental organizations and businesses, who launched over 300 voluntary initiatives.
In 2012, countries will meet again in Rio de Janeiro from 14-16 May, to determine the next steps for achieving sustainable development — to manage and protect the ecosystem and bring about a more prosperous future for everyone.