TheWorld Summit on Sustainable Development 2002, took place in South Africa, from 26 August to 4 September 2002. It was convened to discusssustainable development organizations, 10 years after the firstEarth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. (It was therefore also informally nicknamed "Rio 10.")
TheJohannesburg Declaration was the main outcome of the Summit; however, there were several other international agreements.
It laid out the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation as an action plan.[1]
Johannesburg, 27 August: agreement was made to restore the world's depleted fisheries for 2015. It was agreed to by negotiators at the World Summit.
Instead of new agreements between governments, the Earth Summit was organized mostly around almost 300 "partnership initiatives" known asType II, as opposed to Type I Partnerships which are the more classic outcome of international treaties. These were to be the key means to achieve theMillennium Development Goals. These are kept in a database of Partnerships for Sustainable Development.[2]
The absence of the United States rendered the summit partially impotent.George W. Bush boycotted the summit and did not attend. Except for a brief appearance byColin Powell, who hurriedly addressed the closing stages of the conference while his airplane taxied on the runway of Johannesburg International, the US government did not send a delegation, earning Bush praise in a letter from conservative organizations such asAmericans for Tax Reform,American Enterprise Institute, andCompetitive Enterprise Institute.[3][4]
The United NationsConference on the Human Environment, was first held inStockholm, Sweden, in June 1972, and marked the emergence of international environmental law. The Declaration on the Human Environment also known as the Stockholm Declaration set out the principles for various international environmental issues, including human rights, natural resource management, pollution prevention and the relationship between the environment and development. The conference also led to the creation of theUnited Nations Environment Programme.
TheBrundtland Commission set up byGro Harlem Brundtland, the pioneer ofsustainable development, provided the momentum for firstEarth Summit 1992 – the United Nations Conference on Environmental Development (UNCED), that was also headed by Maurice Strong, who had been a prominent member of the Brundtland Commission – and also forAgenda 21.
South Africa's firstNational Conference on Environment and Development entitled, "Ecologise Politics, Politicise Ecology" was held at theUniversity of the Western Cape in conjunction with theCape Town Ecology Group and the Western Cape Branch of theWorld Conference on Religion and Peace in 1991. Prominent persons involved in this conference wereEbrahim Rasool,Cheryl Carolus, Faried Esack, and Julia Martin.
The initial informal discussions on a possible new Summit in 2002 were held in February 1998 and hosted by Derek Osborn who co-chaired the preparatory meetings for Rio+5 andStakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future. A set of 10 governments started working informally to start putting together the possible agenda for a Summit. the non-papers produced in 1998 and 1999 ensured that when the UN Commission met in 2000 it could agree to host another Summit in 2002.
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