"The conference was opened and addressed by the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme and secretary-general Kurt Waldheim to discuss the state of the global environment. Attended by the representatives of 113 countries, 19 inter-governmental agencies, and more than 400 inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations, it is widely recognized as the beginning of modern political and public awareness of global environmental problems."--Wikiped, Dec.2013
This volume asks what security means in the Anthropocene era and what political innovations are needed to chart a more sustainable path for global development in the decades to come.
The Stockholm Conference of 1972 drew the world’s attention to the global environmental crisis, but for people in Sweden the threat was nothing new. Anyone who read the papers or watched the television news was already familiar with the issues. Five years early, in the summer of 1967, the situation was very different. So what happened in between? This book explores the ‘environmental turn’ that took place in Sweden in the late-1960s. This radical change, the realisation that human beings were in the process of destroying their own environment, had major and far-reaching consequences. What was it that opened people’s eyes to the crisis? When did it happen? Who set the ball rolling? These are some of the questions the book addresses, shedding new light on the history of environmentalism.
To mark its 40th anniversary, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has sponsored a new book detailing the history of the Nairobi-based organisation over the last four decades. Written by award-winning conservationist Stanley P Johnson, the book charts the evolution of UNEP from its inception at the landmark Stockholm conference of 1972 to its position today at the heart of the global environmental movement. Entitled: "The First 40 Years; A Narrative", the book - which is not an official UN history but the view of its world-acclaimed author - explains in depth UNEP's role at the forefront of efforts to protect the environment and is stuffed with interesting facts and figures.
The international community has long grappled with the issue of safeguarding the environment and encouraging sustainable development, often with little result. The 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development was an emphatic attempt to address this issue, setting down 27 key principles for the international community to follow. These principles define the rights of people to sustainable development, and the responsibilities of states to safeguard the common environment. The Rio Declaration established that long term economic progress required a connection to environmental protection. It was designed as an authoritative and comprehensive statement of the principles of sustainable development law, an instrument to take stock of the past international and domestic practice, a guide for the design of new multilateral environmental regimes, and as a reference for litigation. This commentary provides an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the principles of the Declaration, written by over thirty inter-disciplinary contributors, including both leading practitioners and academics. Each principle is analysed in light of its origins and rationale. The book investigates each principle's travaux préparatoires setting out the main points of controversy and the position of different countries or groups. It analyses the scope and dimensions of each principle, providing an in-depth understanding of its legal effects, including whether it can be relied before a domestic or international court. It also assesses the impact of the principles on subsequent soft law and treaty development, as well as domestic and international jurisprudence. The authors demonstrate the ways in which the principles interact with each other, and finally provide a detailed analysis of the shortcomings and future potential of each principle. This book will be of vital importance to practitioners, scholars, and students of international environomental law and sustainable development.
This book analyzes the law and policy for the management of global common resources. As competing demands on the global commons are increasing, the protection of environment and the pursuit of growth give rise to all sorts of conflicts. It also analyzes issues in the protection of the global commons from a fairness, effectiveness and world order perspective. The author examines whether policymaking and trends point to a fair allocation of global common resources that is effective in protecting the environment and the pursuit of sustainable development. The author looks at the cost-effectiveness of international environmental law and applies theories of national environmental law to international environmental problems. Chapters include analysis on areas such as marine pollution, air pollution, fisheries management, transboundary water resources, biodiversity, hazardous and radioactive waste management, state responsibility and liability.
The Encyclopedia is an international, interdisciplinary, and collaborative project, spanning all the relevant areas of scholarship related to issues of global justice, and edited and advised by leading scholars from around the world. The wide-ranging entries present the latest ideas on this complex subject by authors who are at the cutting edge of inquiry.
The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg 2002 was the latest conference in an international process to manage environment and development issues that can be traced back to the late 1960s. Three milestones mark this 30-year process of social and political interaction: the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), held in Stockholm in 1972, the first international meeting at a high political level convened to address environmental issues; the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro; and the WSSD, which attempted to set policy goals and targets for the global environmental and developmental challenges previously identified.But what did the WSSD achieve? Following the summit there have been various opinions of its significance and its outputs, many of them negative. This book argues that there is a need to place the WSSD in its broader context. Understanding the connections between the WSSD and its precedents as well as those between this overall process and individual environmental decision-making processes (such as on climate change), and how they all contribute to the overall global policy process, adds a critical dimension to the analysis of the WSSD outcomes. This book examines the challenges facing the global policy process for sustainable development as it continues beyond Johannesburg into the future. It combines a forward outlook with a historical perspective in tracing the evolution of selected cross-cutting themes on the agenda of the three conferences, the institutions and formal results of the process, and the actors and their patterns of interaction over time. The focus is on the decision-making dimension – the multilateral negotiations-which can be seen as the development over time of a pattern of interlinked political activities.Global Challenges has four operational objectives: first, to define the ongoing process that formally began with the Stockholm Conference in 1972 and evolved towards its latest major manifestation at the WSSD; second, to present some dynamics of the Stockholm–Rio–Johannesburg (SRJ) process by exploring the themes identified; third, to introduce an approach on how to consider the outcomes of this process as a way of reflecting on what the process has actually accomplished; and, finally, to discuss lessons learned for theory and practice from this exercise. The practical lessons include reflections on how the continued SRJ process should best be organised and supported into the future. The book takes a uniquely broad outlook and interdisciplinary approach in addressing important lessons relating to the emergence of substantive issues as well as to process and institutional dynamics. It is a bridge-building exercise from academic analysis to long-term strategic thinking in environmental regime building. Global Challenges provides a new perspective on the continuing and increasingly complex global environment and development policy process and analyses the interlinkages between the process, trends and cross-cutting issues that set the conditions for the global efforts to achieve sustainable development. It will be essential reading for academics and practitioners interested in seeing the big picture of the global challenges facing people and planet in the 21st century.
This book discusses the dominant paradigms and controversies that shaped debate at the time of the Stockholm conference, and in the twenty years between Stockholm and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. It examines the challenges of international cooperation and institutional reform.
