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The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the “Earth Summit,” was a major international conference held in 1992 at which representatives of almost every nation of the world participated in an effort to forge a plan for economic development and environmental protection. For many years prior to the meeting, conflicting views about the value of economic development versus environmental protection stood in the way of international progress on environmental issues in negotiations between states of the world. In 1987, a new understanding of the problem of environment versus development was introduced, and proposals for simultaneously dealing with problems of the environment and poverty were offered in a report called Our Common Future. The report was prepared by a United Nations (UN) special commission on Environment and Development headed by Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway as a response to worsening environmental problems and the bleak environmental future of the world. According to this new understanding, sustainable development was defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their own needs.”
After this report, between 1989 and 1992, member states of the United Nations started to prepare for a global summit to address sustainable development comprehensively. There was a preparatory committee created under the General Assembly of the UN to gather and prepare documents to be discussed and agreed to during the 1992 conference. After a very thorough preparation process, the UN Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit) took place June 3-14, 1992, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The conference was headed by General Maurice F. Strong of Canada, who also headed the UN Conference on Human Environment in 1972. There were 172 governments participating, of which 108 were represented by their highest government officials. There was also participation on the part of nearly 2,400 representatives from roughly 1,000 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) who were among 17,000 people attending a parallel forum designed to coincide with the UN event. This injected perspectives from civil society into a policy forum at which only nation states had traditionally had input. This conference was the biggest and one of the most important environmental events in history.
A number of documents, prepared only by the official state participants, came out of the conference, including Agenda 21, a plan of action for advancing sustainable development. In addition, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development served as a set of guiding principles. Other official declarations included the Statement of Forest Principles, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The conference attendees also created institutions that would function as follow-up mechanisms for these documents, including the Commission on Sustainable Development, the Inter-agency Committee on Sustainable Development, and the High-level Advisory Board on Sustainable Development.
First Versus Third World
During the preparatory meetings and the conference, major compromises were made in order for all parties to reach a consensus. The central debate between the industrially developed “North” and the less developed “South” regarding the value of economic development versus environmental protection continued throughout the preparation process and during the conference. The developing countries were primarily concerned with issues such as the alleviation of poverty through financing of development from developed countries, access to technology for sustainable development as well as a focus on issue areas of freshwater, desertification, deforestation and pollution.
The issues were difficult to resolve even among the less-developed nations. For example, developing countries face a difficult dilemma in regard to deforestation. Forests are important to prevent landslides, which affect poor people disproportionately. Additionally, plants and animals in the forests can be a source of livelihood for the subsistence of the poor communities. Thus, the loss of these habitats affect the lives and livelihoods of people in the South. Yet, while protection of forests is an important issue, states are also hesitant to treat issues such as deforestation as global problems given sensitivity toward the protection of their sovereignty and the rights of state to exploit resources within their own borders. During the negotiations between and among developed and less-developed nations, these types of conflicts were difficult to manage. There were also pressures from NGO groups felt by governments before and during the conference.
In looking at the other major constituency, the advanced industrialized countries wanted to focus on the problems of ozone depletion, the production and disposal of hazardous wastes by industry, and global warming. These were issues that the lessdeveloped countries blamed on the high levels of consumption by the wealthy nations of the North. Dozens of such topics had to be addressed throughout the four years and five rounds of negotiations between states before the conference.
Rio Declaration
In Rio, the final document was negotiated. Some, including conference president Maurice Strong, characterized the outcome of the Earth Summit as falling short of its originally envisioned goals. Yet many also felt it was a great accomplishment to have such a large meeting of world leaders and come to an agreement on a set of principles and an action plan that satisfied and reflected the concerns of such disparate groups. In the 27 principles of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, the states emphasized the importance of state sovereignty, the rights of states to equitable sustainable development, and the need for more aid for developing nations with a priority on the least-developed countries.
The advanced industrialized countries were acknowledged as responsible for global environmental problems and called for states to eliminate unsustainable patterns of production and consumption. The importance of technology, women, youth, and indigenous groups were recognized for their role in achieving sustainable development as well as citizens’ right to know about their environment. The states were declared responsible for enacting legislation on environmental standards and protection of their citizens. The importance of transparency and cooperation between states on environmental issues was also emphasized.
Agenda 21
The main document emerging from the conference, Agenda 21, lays out a comprehensive plan of action for global sustainable development. The document has four major subheading areas with a total of 40 chapters. The first area covers social and economic issues including poverty, consumption, population, health, human settlements, and the development of policies to be able to deal with these issues, especially in the developing nations. The second area on conservation and management of resources dealt with major environmental problems in the context of development. The areas of focus were atmosphere, land resources, deforestation, desertification, mountain development, sustainable agriculture and rural development, biological diversity, biotechnology, oceans, freshwater resources, toxic chemicals, and different kinds of hazardous wastes. The third section dealt with the strengthening of major groups necessary for the achievement of sustainable development. Women, children, indigenous people, NGOs, local authorities, workers and their trade unions, business and industry, and the scientific and technological community as well as farmers were recognized as important groups in bringing about sustainable development.
In the last section of the document, the means of implementation and financing sustainable development initiatives were discussed. The rich states reaffirmed their commitment to providing 0.7 percent of their Gross National Product (GNP) in aid to fund sustainable development in the less-developed nations. But there were no new commitments made by the rich countries to meet the goals set up by Agenda 21.
Other Documents
Among the other major documents to come out of the conference was the Convention on Climate Change. This was negotiated and signed in Rio with the goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. This was agreed upon without specific limitations set for nation states, but nevertheless this convention led to the Kyoto Protocol, which sets specific targets for different countries. Another agreement, the Convention on Biodiversity, was less successful in gaining acceptance due to disagreements on funding, but 158 signatories of the convention have agreed to conserve biological diversity. A final document created during the conference was the Forest Principles, which calls on states to further cooperate on forest issues.
Bibliography:
- Halpern, United Nations Conference on Environment and Development: Process and Documentation (Academic Council for the United Nations System, 1992);
- Karen Mingst and Margaret P. Karns, The United Nations in the Post-Cold War Era (Westview, 2000);
- A. Parson, P.M. Haas, and M.A. Levy, “A Summary of Major Documents Signed at the Earth Summit and the Global Forum,” Environment (v.34/4, 1992);
- United Nations, Basic Facts about the United Nations (United Nations, 2004);
- Thomas G. Weiss, David P. Forsythe, and Roger Coate, The United Nations and Changing World Politics (Westview, 2004).
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