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Assessing Unced and the State of Sustainable Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2017

Edward A. Parson
Edward A. Parson*
Affiliation:
Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
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Abstract

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Type
Lessons Learned from UNCED
Information
Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting , Volume 87 , 1993 , pp. 508 - 513
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 1993

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References

1 See, e.g., MacNeill, Jim, The 1992 Rio Conference: Setting the Global Compass, in Center for our Common Future, Rio Reviews 33 (1992)Google Scholar; and Helge Ole Bergeson, Empty Symbols, or a Process That Can’t Be Reversed?, Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Oslo, August 1992.

2 Perhaps the most striking example of this phenomenon in the environmental field is the 1982 World Charter for Nature.

3 The tortured “commitments” language of the climate convention signed in Rio admits precisely this dissent. Governments have asserted both that it does, and that it does not, represent a binding carbon dioxide stabilization target.

4 Indeed, this judgment cannot be made cleanly even much later, for it requires making the counterfactual comparison, how would the world look if UNCED had not happened?

5 Haas, Peter M., Levy, Marc A., and Parson, Edward A., Appraising the Earth Summit, 34 Environment, October 1992, at 8Google Scholar.

6 It is unfortunate, though, that these provisions are principally written in terms of specific issue areas. For example, there are separate plans to improve management and distribution of information pertaining to forests, health, agriculture and climate, but no provisions to improve coordinated access to information across these issue areas.

7 Hard-negotiated text defining the CSD’s plan of work continues to mention, but not require, national reporting as one of the Commission’s means of gathering information.

8 Two particularly promising sources of high-quality, objective, nongovernmental information for the Commission’s deliberations will be the Earth Council, a body established at the initiative of UNCED Secretary-General Maurice Strong, and the Secretary-General’s newly established High-Level Advisory Body of Experts, fifteen to twenty-five experts who will serve the Secretary-General, the Senior Advisory Committee on Coordination, and the Commission in their individual capacities.

9 UNDP’s “Capacity 21” initiative, for example.

10 E.g., Runnalls, David, Successes and Failures from Rio, Earth Summit Times, June 15, 1992, at 7Google Scholar.