Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

Photo by IISD/ENB | Anastasia Rodopoulou By  Hugo-Maria Schally  former Head of the Multilateral Environmental Cooperation Unit at the Directorate-General for Environment, European Commission.  (originally published on Inter Press Service here) Introduction The governance of nature and biodiversity has evolved from early 20th-century treaties on hunting and migratory species to today’s complex web of multilateral environmental agreements. Initial efforts, such as the 1902 Convention for the Protection of Birds useful to Agriculture, reflected utilitarian concerns, but by the 1970s global awareness of extinction and habitat loss led to more systemic instruments, including the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (1971) and Washington Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (1973). The 1992 Rio Earth Summit marked a turning point with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the first treaty to address biodiversity at genetic, species, and ecosystem levels, ...