Moos’ Blog


Bio­di­ver­sity Counts!
Obser­va­tions and opin­ions con­cern­ing zoos, evo­lu­tion, nature con­ser­va­tion and the way we treat/​support the ecosys­tems which are sup­posed to serve us.


201222Jun21:57

The [UN] Future We Want .…..NOT

Infor­ma­tion
pub­lished 22 June 2012 | mod­i­fied 18 Decem­ber 2016

Rio+20, the United Nations con­fer­ence on sus­tain­able devel­op­ment, did not bring what it should have: hope. Hope that future gen­er­a­tions can enjoy Planet Earth, that the Planet’s ecosys­tems will not fur­ther be dis­rupted by today’s afflu­ent population’s greed.

In 1992 the Rio UN con­fer­ence (the Rio “Earth Sum­mit”) paved the way for quite a few achieve­ments with regard to Earth’s sus­tain­abil­ity. For instance, the Con­ven­tion on Bio­log­i­cal Diver­sity was opened for sig­na­ture at the Rio “Earth Sum­mit”. In addi­tion, it led to the Kyoto pro­to­col, an inter­na­tional agree­ment adopted in Kyoto (Japan) in 1997, which sets bind­ing tar­gets for 37 indus­tri­alised coun­tries and the Euro­pean com­mu­nity for reduc­ing green­house gas (GHG) emis­sions. Fur­ther dete­ri­o­ra­tion of Earth’s ecosys­tems make progress of the sus­tain­abil­ity efforts imper­a­tive, and suc­ces­ful nego­ti­a­tions and agree­ments in Rio 2012 essential.

As always a draft agree­ment was pre­pared by UN mem­bers before­hand, to adopt dur­ing the three day meet­ing. But already the draft agree­ment was a weak doc­u­ment, and it seemed unlikely that it would become stronger dur­ing the dis­cus­sions at the con­fer­ence. And this was kind of pre­dicted by UN Sec­re­tary Gen­eral Ban Ki-​Moon in his open­ing state­ment of the conference

Let me be frank. Our efforts have not lived up to the mea­sure of the challenge

Well, did Ban Ki-Moon’s words already said it all, the fol­low­ing does not allow any mis­un­der­stand­ing of the grand mis­take the politi­cians have made in Rio this week:

Cow­ards at Rio?: organ­i­sa­tions decry ‘pathetic’ agreement

Rio+20 Has Become the Sum­mit of Futility

Rio+20 draft text is 283 para­graphs of fluff

Rio sum­mit: Lit­tle progress, 20 years on

If you really want to know how grim the future of Planet Earth looks, and how short­sighted and pow­er­less today’s politi­cians world­wide are then you should read The Future We Want, the final agree­ment. But if you really want to mean some­thing in this sus­tain­abil­ity bat­tle than I sug­gest you go for the NGO that best fit your pur­pose and give it all you got. Because it is up to us, to make the world any bet­ter, that’s for sure!


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Goal: 7000 tigers in the wild

Tiger range countries map

Tiger map” (CC BY 2.5) by Sander­son et al., 2006.

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