Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development

The "Green Economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication" or The UN's Rio+20, is being held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from June 20-22, 2012. The conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) meeting marks the 20th...

June 20, 2012 | Source: Food First | by Eric Holt-Gimenez, Agnes Walton and Mariagiulia Mariani

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The “Green Economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication” or The UN’s Rio+20, is being held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from June 20-22, 2012. The conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) meeting marks the 20th anniversary of Rio’s first “Earth Summit,” the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), as well as the 10th anniversary of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg, South Africa. For two days Rio will host heads of state and high-level officials from 190 countries as they attempt to negotiate a global roadmap for sustainable development. Over 50,000 participants from the private sector and civil society are meeting in side events and parallel events in and near the conference.

In the shadow of the global economic crisis, this year’s conference will focus on the “Green Economy.” Enshrined in the 2011 United Nations Environment Program’s report “Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication,” the concept aims to usher in global economic growth by putting market values on environmental services and environmentally-friendly production and consumption.

This conference is a far cry from Rio’s first Earth Summit 20 years ago. Then, world leaders produced the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), leading to the 1997 the Kyoto Protocol and Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), followed up with meetings of the Convention of the Parties (COP) and a comprehensive (non-binding) blueprint for action to combat poverty, curb unsustainable consumption, protect the atmosphere and end deforestation known as Agenda 21.

But the Kyoto Protocol is moribund and Agenda 21 resulted in little progress on the ground. General agreement by policymakers and scientists worldwide is that the Rio process is stalled or ineffective. Rio has, however, cleared the way for the private sector with new market-based approaches to environmentalism. This “green capitalism’ ensures the continued expansion of markets through the “privatization of rights to nature, the creation of new commodities and markets from nature, the green sanction for otherwise declining forms of capital accumulation and the disabling of institutions that could pose a threat to expanded accumulation” (Corson and MacDonald 2012:264).