“Rio+20” refers to the 20 years since the 1992 Earth Summit. Twenty years before that, the UN Conference on the Human Environment (5–16 June 1972, Stockholm, Sweden)—attended by 113 Member States—was the first such meeting to discuss the state of the environment and the impact of human activity on the planet. Former United Nations employee Thérèse Gastaut was there.
Just appointed to the Executive Office of Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, Thérèse had already worked for a year-and-a-half under the Conference’s Secretary-General, Maurice Strong (Canada) in Geneva, and had transferred to New York with the understanding that she would resume her duties during the Conference. “All staff on the team sensed we were making history,” Thérèse recalls.
As recorded in the 1972 Yearbook of the United Nations (pp. 318–25), Strong conceived the Conference as launching a new movement to free humanity from environmental risks of its own making. Such a movement towards a peaceful, habitable and just planet entailed liberation from the destructive forces of mass poverty, racial prejudice, economic injustice and the technologies of modern warfare.
According to Thérèse, “we knew we were breaking new ground, and that we were opening new paths that would change humanity’s ways and our planet’s destiny.” In the end, she says, the Conference succeeded in “associating countries of the North and the South around common visions”—although at first some suspected that “now that they had polluted the world, industrialized countries would not agree to clean the mess they created, and would request that the South not add to it.” The Conference was headed for a deadlock, Thérèse recalls, but a speech by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi saved the day by encapsulating the spirit of the Conference in the declaration that fighting poverty was the best way to protect the environment.
At the time, there was media criticism of the inability of Member States to agree on goals and objectives. A Miami News report of 19 June 1972, however, considered the Conference “successful and significant” simply because it occurred. “Five years ago,” said the News, “there could not conceivably have been such an event. That it has happened now shows how the environment has entered the political consciousness of the world. It is going to stay there.”
One Conference outcome was the founding of World Environment Day on 5 June. Following the Conference, the General Assembly passed 11 resolutions on environmental issues, also establishing the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) to enhance UN collaboration in protecting the environment.
Mainstreaming ‘sustainable development’
In 1980, the concept of “sustainable development” first appeared in the Yearbook—in the context of the International Development Strategy for the Second United Nations Development Decade, with its aim of an “environmentally sustainable process”—as in resolution 35/74, part of the General Assembly’s support for integrating environmental concerns into development programmes (see YUN 1980, pp. 497, 719 & 724). Two years later, recognizing the importance of protecting natural resources in the interest of present and future generations, the Assembly adopted the World Charter for Nature (Earth Charter), which stipulated that resources “shall be managed to achieve optimum sustainable productivity” and that “nature shall be secured against degradation” (YUN 1982, p. 1025–25). ‘Sustainable development’ continued to take shape after the World Commission on Environment and Development, convened by the UN in 1983, defined it as meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Outlook on Rio+20
Looking ahead, Thérèse acknowledges that current economic and financial crises entail that Rio+20 will take place in a difficult context—one in which leaders tend to give priority to the economy and the short term. “That being said,” she observes, “there is worldwide understanding that something must be done to protect the environment and biodiversity and limit climate change. We all expect that at least Rio+20 will adopt new Sustainable Development Goals. This would be a useful outcome as these ‘SDGs’ would offer a new road map for the States and peoples of the world.”
