Views from civil society on the 10 Year Framework

3. What outcomes are possible from Rio+20?

What do you believe can be some meaningful and useful outcomes from the proposed Rio+20 conference on sustainable development in 2012? What useful agreements or actions on sustainable production and consumption and the "green economy" do you think are possible?

Peter Adriance, Baha'is of the U.S.

• An agreement on improved means of international environmental governance.
• A declaration of principles to guide and encourage sustainable consumption and production
• Tools to measure impacts of production and consumption.

Bas de Leeuw, The Sustainability Institute

See above (Q.2): starting concrete framework discussions on ‘getting the prices right’ (taxes on raw resources) and on preparing the ground for resource use agreements. Furthermore, work with social scientists, philosophers, etc, and advertising and marketing experts to deeply explore ways to get immaterial consumption, and values as ‘affinity’, ‘love’, ‘respect’ into mainstream thinking and acting of individuals and politicians

Feargal Duff, Irish Doctors Environmental Asssociation (IDEA)

The current economic crisis and the worsening environmental situation is an opportunity to promote a fundamental transition of the global economy which fully and credibly accounts for the global commons. 

Our ecological assets are at the very core of our long term wealth.  Ecological Services need to be valued as important assets and therefore need to be valued costed and accounted. 

Rajan Gandhi, SAG (India)

Rio+20  is not likely to be meaningful unless all countries come on board.  Assuming that they do (high hope !),  a good starting point would be a review of performance against the MDGs – how far has the world got, what have been the problems/obstacles.  Perhaps a more meaningful accord in Climate Change will have been reached by then – certainly Copenhagen was a disaster.

It might be a bit premature, therefore, to speculate on what needs to be agreed at Rio+20 – better to wait till Mexico.

The “green economy” and the Green Growth Initiative are great in concept but in will be extremely difficult in implementation unless all countries – particularly the developed countries – agree to take measures to alter their practices pretty radically.

Ke Chung Kim, Ph. D., Dipl.-ABFE
Professor of Entomology and Curator Emeritus, Frost Entomological Museum, Department of Entomology;
Director Emeritus, Center for BioDiversity Research, PSIEE, The Pennsylvania State University

As you clearly understood and stated in the prefatory note for this survey, this another conference with large costs could come up with a serious paradigm shift from the misguided principles and superficial high-level intellectual exercises to realistic approach to starting with sacrificial modification of current life-style, consumption and production patterns, based on the critical evaluation of how badly we have abused environment and continued loss of biodiversity  in the name of building “sustainable” economic development (I put “sustainability” in parenthesis because it has been used in a sense of hope and aspiration than practicality.  We simply cannot achieve our goals of sustainability without changing our paradigm built on the reality of your first statement “ As you know, unsustainable production and consumption patterns continue to expand and are the main cause of worsening environmental and social trends (e.g., climate change, biodiversity loss, the food and water crises, and economic insecurity).

Leonard Sonnenschein, World Aquarium

• Investment in green technology everywhere.
  
  
• Establishment of protected areas (MPAs, World Heritage and Biosphere reserve sites).
  
  
• Establish local sustainable harvesting rates (fishing catch quotas, timing of crop harvesting to match the seasonal shifts, etc).
  
  
• Increase microfinancing worldwide.
  
  
• Establishment of baseline data, creation of goals and ways of measuring and recording fulfillment of the goals to determine workability.

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