business as usual

The Rio+20 global environment conference in June aimed to set the environment agenda for the next 20 years. The consensus was that Rio delivered virtually nothing. The pre-agreed outcome document ‘The Future We Want’ is a 49-page wish list of clichés and aspirations, but it does not address or respond to the fundamental issues needing action at all. It failed completely to acknowledge the central importance of unsustainable population growth on a planet of rapidly diminishing resources. The blog gives a one-page summary.

Motherhood statements, no family planning

The outcome document for the Rio+20 environment summit in June 2012 is 49 pages long. Some 23,917 words. Women were mentioned in less than 0.01 percent of the text. And only two of the 283 sections addressed women's needs for family planning.

Nothing concrete came out of the closing day of Rio+20, though countries have agreed in principle to work towards setting up new 'sustainable development goals', The world has agreed to a set of new ‘sustainable development goals’, says Caroline Spelman, the UK’s Environment Secretary. Her priorities will be on the sustainable development goals. Between now and September there will be a lot of preparation for a UN meeting which will try to choose which thematic areas the goals should focus on. For the UK, the three priorities would be energy, water and food. (Not population of course, the underlying driver)

The Prince of Wales in video to Rio conference 2012:

“Like a sleepwalker, we seem unable to wake up to the fact that so many of the catastrophic consequences of carrying on with “business-as-usual” are bearing down on us faster than we think, already dragging many millions more people into poverty and dangerously weakening global food, water and energy security for the future,” he said. “It is, perhaps, a trait of human nature to act only when the worst happens, but that is not a trait we can afford to rely on here. Once the worst does happen, I am afraid that this time around it will be too late to act at all.”

“The international community needed to be better informed on the facts otherwise it will be faced with “panicked responses to crises that could have been avoided.”

Mathis Wackernagel, President Global Footprint Network

Today, humanity uses the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and to absorb our emissions. The majority of countries and states operate their economies without tracking the ecological resources they use against what they actually have. It is like flying a plane without a fuel gauge, and it affects everything from what you pay at the grocery store to the type of world you and your children will live in.

Dr. William E. Rees, ecological economist and former director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning in a blog June 12, 2012:

“The Use and Misuse of the Concept of Sustainability.”

“The concepts of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainability’ continue to be subverted, distorted and otherwise misused in the ongoing political debates concerning global change and economic development. Society continues to be in deep denial of fundamental facts pertaining to contemporary biophysical reality and the increasingly global socio-cultural context within which the human universe is unfolding."

After Rio, we know. Governments have given up on the planet

George Monbiot, The Guardian 25 June 2012:

It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth's living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit in Rio last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue "sustained growth", the primary cause of the biosphere's losses.