The Earth Summit is the popular name given to the UN Conference on Environment and Development, held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Approximately 170 governments participated with over 2,400 representatives from NGOs.
The Earth Summit resulted in the following documents, which have become among the most important documents for sustainable development of our time:
- Rio Declaration on Environment and Development: principles that emphasized the coordination of economic and environmental concerns;
- Agenda 21: global measures to protect the planet's environment while guaranteeing sustainable economic growth;
- Forest Principles: preservation of forests and monitoring impact on timberlands;
- Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD): which proposed a participative approach involving local communities to combat desertification in specific ecosystems;
- Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD): this international agreement aims to conserve biological diversity, to use its components in a sustainable way and to share fairly and equitably, between all people involved, the benefits that arise from the use of genetic resources.
- UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): this convention aims to provide a framework for actions to curb human-caused climate change well within manageable dimensions.
The Conventions on Biological Diversity, Combating Desertification, and Climate Change are often dubbed "the three Rio conventions". The UNFCCC is the most famous and in turn led to the Kyoto Protocol. In 1997, countries concerned with climatic changes met in Kyoto, Japan, and established emission reduction commitments from a 1990-baseline. The global reduction target is 7% by 2012, the end of the first commitment period. Unfortunately, the USA (the largest emitter per capita) has not ratified the Kyoto protocol up to today.
The Earth Summit also began a new functional commission of the UN Economic and Social Committee (ECOSOC), namely the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), which has a mandate to monitor international progress on sustainable development, provide policy direction, and coordinate action within the United Nations system to achieve the goals of Agenda 21.
Ten years later, in 2002, the Rio+10 Conference was held in Johannesburg, South Africa, and produced the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPOI). This document aimed at providing further guidance to operationalize sustainable development through advancing three priorities:
- Poverty eradication.
- Changing unsustainable patters of consumption and production.
- Production and protecting the natural resource base.
Finally, sustainable development has emerged as one of the most prominent development paradigms over the last four decades. It aims to provide a holistic approach, enveloping several dimensions such as economic, environmental, social and participatory development into a single framework. Over recent years, we have seen a growing institutionalisation of sustainable development on the international level.
The information above is taken from - Rioplustwenties, 2011. Rio+20 Participation Guide - An introduction for children and youth. Brussels
Rio + 20 The Objectives
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