Earth Summit  

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The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, the Rio Summit, the Rio Conference, and the Earth Summit (Portuguese: ECO92), was a major United Nations conference held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June 1992.

Earth Summit was created as a response for Member States to cooperate together internationally on development issues after the Cold War. Due to conflict relating to sustainability being too big for individual member states to handle, Earth Summit was held as a platform for other Member States to collaborate. Since the creation, many others in the field of sustainability show a similar development to the issues discussed in these conferences, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

In 2012, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development was also held in Rio, and is also commonly called Rio+20 or Rio Earth Summit 2012. It was held from 13 to 22 June.

The issues addressed included:

• systematic scrutiny of patterns of production — particularly the production of toxic components, such as lead in gasoline, or poisonous waste including radioactive chemicals
• alternative sources of energy to replace the use of fossil fuels which delegates linked to global climate change
• new reliance on public transportation systems in order to reduce vehicle emissions, congestion in cities and the health problems caused by polluted air and smoke
• the growing usage and limited supply of water

An important achievement of the summit was an agreement on the Climate Change Convention which in turn led to the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. Another agreement was to "not to carry out any activities on the lands of indigenous peoples that would cause environmental degradation or that would be culturally inappropriate".

The Convention on Biological Diversity was opened for signature at the Earth Summit, and made a start towards redefinition of measures that did not inherently encourage destruction of natural ecoregions and so-called uneconomic growth.

Although President George H.W. Bush signed the Earth Summit’s Convention on Climate, his EPA Administrator William K. Reilly acknowledges that U.S. goals at the conference were difficult to negotiate and the agency’s international results were mixed, including the U.S. failure to sign the proposed Convention on Biological Diversity.

See also

• Earth Summits - with a list of the Earth Summits since the first one in 1972
• Earth Summit 2002 "Rio+10" held in Johannesburg
• Ecology summit
• Global Map
• National Strategy for a Sustainable America
• Precautionary principle
• Regional Forum on Environment and Health in Southeast and East Asian countries
• The Environmental Institute
• United Nations Conference on the Human Environment 1972
• United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development also known as "Rio 2012" or "Rio+20", hosted by Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, as a 20-year follow-up to the historic 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED).
• United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification
• Tommy Koh - link to the Chairman of the Main Committee of the UN Conference on Environment and Development
• Severn Suzuki