One year from now, on 4 June 2012, the Rio summit on sustainable development will begin, at the same time marking the twentieth anniversary of the landmark 1992 Earth Summit in the same city. Preparations are well behind where they should be at this stage, and there is a real risk that it will be the latest in a series of damp squibs for the international sustainable development agenda.
David Steven and I have just completed a new paper (pdf) on the summit, which is the latest output from the NYU Center on International Cooperation’s resource scarcity program. In it, we explore the reasons why so little progress has been made on making development sustainable since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 – and set out some suggestions for how Rio 2012 could start to turn things around, not just within the environment policy silo, but also more broadly on renewing the international development agenda beyond 2015 and tackling the global risks that make up the ‘long crisis’ of globalisation that we have written about before for the Brookings Institution.
We argue that three overarching themes will be critical for making progress on these areas: greening growth, facing up to the issues of fair shares that arise in a world of limits, and building resilience to shocks and stresses, both internationally and within states (especially fragile ones). While Rio 2012 faces a tough political context, it could still – with a major push from key actors – make a tangible difference on all three fronts.
You can download the paper here.
