Forty-Five Years Since Stockholm, Twenty-Five Years Since the Earth Summit and Five Years Since Rio+20
Reproduced from Inter Service Press UNITED NATIONS, May 30 2017 (IPS) - Over the past five years, I have written with a number of co-authors the history of the sustainable development movement at the global level prior to the first UN Conference on Human Environment held in 1972 through the 1992 Earth Summit and Rio+20 to the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement. I like to think of these books as the ‘Vienna Cafรฉ Trilogy’ after the cafรฉ in the basement of the United Nations headquarters in New York, where many deals are done over coffee. Also, with deference to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts, this trilogy may also have future books. In light of the anniversaries and the political landscape in which we currently find ourselves, I thought it would a good time to review where we are and the state of the discourse on sustainable development. Writing these books did give me a broader perspective than that of...