United Nations work on environmental issues

The Earth Summit was a United Nations conference that took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the conference’s official name, took place during 12 days and was attended by 172 countries.

Given the importance of the summit, a parallel “Global Forum” was organized by several non-governmental organizations 2,400 representatives of such organizations. It was considered a consultative organ by the United Nations.

Apart from creating the well-known Agenda 21, several documents were the result of the conference’s work, such us the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, Forest Principles and specially the Framework Convention on Climate Change that will meet for 15th time next December in Copenhagen.

A second Earth Summit took place 10 years later, in 2002. Held in South Africa, it had the (logical) pseudoname of Rio+10. The most important declaration that resulted from it was the Johannesburg Declaration.

According to Wikipedia, Greenpeace representative Annette Cotter resumed the outside atmosphere with those words:

If the people who were marching today were inside the meeting room representing our planet, there’d be laughter, fun, dancing, and real action.