Henning Melber: World Governments Should Establish Global Sustainability Goals

Henning Melber, author of Limits to Liberation in Southern Africa, and Robert Österbergh have written an article for Pambazuka on the subject of Rio +20 which was held last week. Rio +20 is the United Nations Environment Programme‘s conference on sustainable development where agreements made at the previous conference are evaluated and discussed.

In the article, Melber and Österbergh take a look at the current state of the environment and the idea of a green economy. They call for the establishment of global sustainability goals and for the UN Environment Programme to be given the same authority as the UN so that it can ensure that these goals are met.

The international community gathers in Rio de Janeiro at the UN’s conference on sustainable development. For three days, governments, civil society, multilateral organizations, the business community, and other actors assess the agreements from previous summits on sustainable development and lay down a new international environmental policy. The Rio Summit builds on a long tradition of international summits on the global environment, which dates back to the UN’s first environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972 and, more recently to the Earth Summit, held in Rio in 1992. Both the Stockholm Conference and the Earth Summit were instrumental in putting environment protection on the multilateral agenda. Significantly, they linked the destruction of ecosystems to global poverty and the rich countries’ consumption, as inseparable parts of a complex problem.

• Complete article: Pambazuka

Book details

• Limits to Liberation in Southern Africa: The Unfinished Business of Democratic Consolidation by Henning Melber
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  EAN: 9780796920256
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