Rio+20 rocked by CSD19 flop


Events last week heightened my fears for the 2012 Rio+20, or CSD20, to use the correct UN terminology.

The PR stuff is easy; a bunch of eminent Nobel laureates write down their thoughts about the urgency of sustainable development. Their Stockholm Memorandum is presented to Ban Ki-moon’s high-level panel on Global Sustainability, tasked with prep for Rio+20.

The media covered it but omitted to mention that just a couple of days earlier the UN’s real political business on sustainability collapsed in New York in spectacular failure. Read the IISD report of proceedings of CSD19 and despair.

It concludes that the UN Commission on Sustainable Development “needs fixing and is no longer sustainable.” So we have an unsustainable UN body to fix our unsustainable planet.

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this post was first published by OneWorld UK