São Paulo – The organizers of Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, wants to encourage the participation of civil society in the meeting, which is due June in Rio de Janeiro. For such, April 16th will see the launch of a digital platform for discussion of matters pertaining to the event.
According to ambassador embaixador André Corrêa do Lago, Brazil’s chief negotiator for the conference, the www.riodialogues.org website was developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in partnership with 27 universities in Brazil and abroad, and is capable of gathering up the opinions and proposals of up to 400,000 people.
“The idea is for the platform to be as open as possible,” said the diplomat, adding that the number of participating universities and the user capacity can be expanded. Lago gave a seminar on Rio+20 to journalists this Tuesday (10th) in São Paulo.
The topics selected for discussion are: oceans, food and food security, sustainable development to fight poverty, sustainable development as an answer to the economic and financial crisis, sustainable energy for all, water, the economy of sustainable development, sustainable cities and innovation, unemployment, dignified labour and migration.
The proposals discussed in this e-forum, according to Lago, will then be voted on at a meeting of civil society representatives during the conference.
The ambassador explained that Rio+20 will be held in two parts, each lasting three days. The first part will be dedicated to the completion of negotiations for the event’s final agreement, and the second part will consist of meetings between heads of state and government. In between these two sections, there will be “four days of dialogue on sustainable development for the civil society to discuss key subjects, without the participation of governments or UN representatives.” The debate will take place at Rio Centro, the same venue as the conference’s, and does not preclude other meetings organized by the civil society at other locations in Rio.
Lago stated that during the debate, ten topics which are “important for the future” will be selected for submission to the heads of state at Rio+20, with three recommendations. The ambassador underscored that the idea for this four-day debate came from Brazil. “The Brazilian government wants to increase the impact [of civil society’s participation in the conference] and is developing this dialogue with support from the UN,” he said. “We want to replicate what happened at the Rio 92,” he added, referring to the United Nations Conference on Environment, held 20 years ago in Rio de Janeiro.
Pillars
Regarding the conference itself, Lago insisted that the meeting is not geared towards discussing the environment, but rather at discussing two matters deemed essential by the UN: the green economy within the context of sustainable development, and the eradication of poverty and international governance for sustainable development. All of this, according to him, from the perspective of the environmental, economic and social “pillars.”
One of the challenges, according to the diplomat, is exactly to define what “green economy” is. To the bzan government, according to him, it is an “inclusive economy, an instrument for the strengthening and acceptance of sustainable development from an economic standpoint,” i.e. activities that are at once either harmless or beneficial to the environment, socially sustainable, and profitable.
Another challenge resides in “how to deal with the UN’s structure” in order to organize the green economy on a global scale. A sustainable development commission was established after Rio 92, however according to Lago it is “ineffectual.” “We must create a structure that will work better in the future,” he said. What structure that would be, however, is yet to be decided on.
The conference may mandate the setting of “sustainable development goals,” just as the UN devised the Millennium Development Goals. The goals themselves, though, should not be set at the meeting. According to Lago, Rio+20 will focus on “processes” and not figures. “There will be no debates on reducing [carbon dioxide] emissions,” he said.
He gave a few examples of important topics to be discussed, such as fighting unsustainable production and consumption standards, public transportation, and energy. “This will be an extraordinary incentive to technological innovation,” he said. To the diplomat, the growth of developing countries, and the resulting rise of millions of people to the middle class, is “providing scale” for the introduction of technologies which were considered expensive in the past.
“Negotiations [within the scope of the UN] are progressing towards the document which will launch these processes,” he claimed. “Rio+20 is more of the beginning than the culmination of processes, as was Rio 92,” he said.
Lago also claimed that Brazil negotiations in a bloc, alongside the G77 plus China, a group of developing countries currently presided over by Algeria. Thus, the country is faced with the “challenged with constant improvement in this agenda, showing what it has done, and learning up-to-the-minute items in the sustainable development agenda. “
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
