Tag: Rio Earth Summit

SPECIAL REPORT / Six months after the Rio+20 Earth Summit, a Belgian company, Deceuninck Nv., has begun living up to the plastic industry's voluntary commitments by turning discarded doors, windows and other goods made with PVC into new products.

The United Nations is committed to sustainable development to promote wealth creation and structural change in developing economies. This includes expanding access to energy, says Kandeh K. Yumkella of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.

SPECIAL REPORT / World leaders attending the recent Rio+20 conference agreed to promote sustainable consumption and production, but analysts say getting businesses and buyers to do just that will require far more than words on paper.

SPECIAL REPORT / Disappointed over the failure of the Rio summit to produce ambitious commitments on sustainable growth, conservationists say Europe must now redouble efforts to tackle its own environmental challenges.

Unilever, the European consumer products company, recently announced the first annual results of its Sustainable Living Plan aimed at improving efficiency in the full cycle of its product line – from production through consumption. Jan Zijderveld talks about how the plan – launched in 2010 – has changed the firm’s outlook.

SPECIAL REPORT / One of the questions that world leaders will discuss while gathering at the UN summit in Rio this week is whether future national development should be measured in terms other than the economic.

Jeremy Wates, who heads one of the leading conservation groups in Brussels, says the lack of appetite for binding sustainable development commitments and stronger world environmental governments would contribute to a disappointing Earth Summit.

With European delegates preparing to push a low-carbon agenda at the Rio Earth Summit this week, coal-reliant Poland has prevented EU governments from speaking with a single voice in the bloc's debate on a low-carbon energy future.

SPECIAL REPORT / A UN push to provide electricity to more than 1 billion people who live off the grid is threatened by indecision at an important global development conference this week, despite robust support from EU leaders.

The EU's 27 environment ministers have set out the key elements of the bloc's environment policy for decades to come, calling for "an ambitious and compelling 2050 vision for a green Europe" that decouples economic growth from environmental degradation.

Biodiversity has decreased by an average of 28% globally since 1970 and the world would have to be 50% bigger to have enough land and forests to provide for current levels of consumption and carbon emissions, the conservation group WWF said today (15 May).

Some of the main proposals in a draft text for negotiation at a UN sustainable development conference next month are being watered down at informal talks in New York, observers say, heightening fears the summit will fail to deliver. 

With 60 days left before the Rio sustainable development conference, MEPs have sent a message to the European Commission to produce “without delay” an ambitious environmental agenda for the decade ahead that avoids past failures.

European regions are gearing up for the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June by drawing up a list of “key ingredients” in a bid to make sustainable urban development a focal point of the Brazil discussions.

England’s third dry winter in a row has led British authorities to call for conservation measures, while China’s government has warned that two-thirds of the country’s cities face severe water shortages because of drought and rampant consumption.

European leaders on Friday (2 March) could throw their weight behind a plan to convert the relatively powerless UN Environment Programme (UNEP) into a world body with the muscle to oversee treaties and protect the ecology.

Following four decades of UNEP initiatives on the environment and the green economy, attention turns to the Rio+20 summit where the idea of a true green economy could gain flesh and bones, writes Achim Steiner, from UN Environment Programme.

Italians decidedly rejected nuclear power in a referendum last year, but that does not mean abandoning the study and research on atomic energy, Environment Minister Corrado Clini said in an interview with EurActiv Italy.

Countries will be asked this summer to sign up for 10 new sustainable development goals for the planet and promise to build green economies at the first earth summit in 20 years.

The European Parliament has called on the EU to take the lead in preparing global green actions for the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit next year.

If the world is to make any real progress on sustainable development with the renewed momentum sparked by the Rio+20 Earth summit next year, policies need to be better connected to people's daily activities and given teeth by means of proper accountability and enforcement mechanisms, the World Future Council's Maja Göpel told EurActiv in an interview.

As global environmental talks intensify ahead of next year's Earth Summit in Rio, Brice Lalonde, summit coordinator at the UN, called for a binding agreement on sustainable development to be reached via WTO-style negotiating rounds on topics such as energy or agriculture.

The Rio Earth Summit in May 2012 will try to set a global vision on greening the economy, with France leading European calls to establish a brand new World Environmental Organisation (WEO).

The UN is still trying hard to find agreements on important issues such as trade, globalisation, and development aid, before the Johannesburg World Summit starts on 26 August.