Earth Summit in Rio (1992): The UN Conference on Environment

The Earth Summit, officially the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), met in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 3 to 14 June 1992. With 172 governments and more than 100 heads of state or government taking part, it was at the time the largest gathering of world leaders ever held. It made “sustainable development” a central idea of international politics and launched the global treaties on climate change and biodiversity that still shape environmental diplomacy today.

Background: from Stockholm to Rio

The first major UN meeting on the environment took place in Stockholm in June 1972. It created the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), but the following two decades saw forests shrink, deserts spread and new global problems appear, from acid rain to the thinning of the ozone layer.

In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by the former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, published its report Our Common Future. It defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The report argued that poverty and environmental damage were linked and had to be tackled together.

The same year, the Montreal Protocol showed that countries could agree binding cuts to protect the atmosphere. In December 1989 the UN General Assembly decided to hold a conference on environment and development in 1992, twenty years after Stockholm. Brazil offered to host it, a symbolic choice given worldwide concern about the clearing of the Amazon rainforest.

Preparing the conference

The Canadian businessman and diplomat Maurice Strong, who had also led the Stockholm conference, was appointed secretary-general of UNCED. Four preparatory committee sessions between 1990 and 1992 drafted the texts that leaders would adopt in Rio.

Two treaties were negotiated on separate tracks. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted in New York on 9 May 1992, and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nairobi on 22 May 1992. Both were to be opened for signature at Rio, which gave the summit a concrete focus.

The hardest divisions ran between richer and poorer countries. Developing countries, grouped in the Group of 77 and China, insisted that the industrialised world had caused most of the damage and should pay for clean technology and conservation in the South. Industrialised countries were reluctant to commit large new sums of aid or binding timetables.

What happened in Rio

The conference opened on 3 June 1992 at Riocentro, a convention complex in the west of the city, under heavy security; the Brazilian army patrolled the streets. Brazil’s president Fernando Collor presided, and UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali addressed the opening.

For ten days delegates worked through the remaining bracketed text. The final summit segment on 12 and 13 June brought leaders including US President George H. W. Bush, British Prime Minister John Major, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, French President François Mitterrand and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Some 2,400 representatives of non-governmental organisations were accredited to the official conference, and thousands of journalists covered it.

Alongside the official meeting, a Global Forum of non-governmental organisations gathered in Flamengo Park on the city’s waterfront. According to the UN, about 17,000 people took part; activists, scientists, indigenous representatives and ordinary visitors attended its talks, exhibitions and marches, making the event one of the first truly global meetings of civil society.

The Rio agreements

The conference adopted three documents by consensus on 14 June:

• The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, 27 principles setting out the rights and responsibilities of states. They include the precautionary approach (Principle 15), the idea that the polluter should bear the cost of pollution (Principle 16) and “common but differentiated responsibilities” between rich and poor countries (Principle 7).
• Agenda 21, a 40-chapter, non-binding programme of action covering poverty, consumption, health, cities, oceans, freshwater, waste, finance, technology and the role of groups such as women, young people, indigenous peoples, trade unions and local authorities.
• The Statement of Forest Principles, a non-binding text on the management of all types of forests. Efforts to negotiate a binding forest treaty had failed because many tropical countries saw it as a threat to their sovereignty.

The climate convention was signed in Rio by 154 states and the European Community. Its stated objective is to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. It set no binding emission cuts, only a non-binding aim for developed countries to return emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. The biodiversity convention, with similar numbers of signatures, committed parties to conserve species and ecosystems, use them sustainably and share fairly the benefits of genetic resources.

Controversies and criticism

The United States was the most prominent holdout. President Bush signed the climate convention only after binding targets had been removed, and he refused to sign the biodiversity convention, arguing that it threatened American biotechnology patents and jobs. His position drew protests in Rio and criticism from European allies.

Developing countries were disappointed by the financial outcome. Agenda 21’s secretariat estimated that implementing it would cost developing countries about 600 billion US dollars a year, of which about 125 billion should come from international grants or concessional loans. Pledges in Rio fell far short of that, and the Global Environment Facility, a fund set up in 1991, remained the main financial channel.

Environmental groups complained that the texts avoided firm commitments on consumption in rich countries, trade, population and the activities of multinational companies. Supporters replied that consensus among 172 governments required compromise, and that the summit had placed these questions on the agenda for the first time.

Consequences

In December 1992 the UN General Assembly created the Commission on Sustainable Development to monitor progress on Agenda 21. Thousands of towns and cities around the world adopted “Local Agenda 21” plans in the following decade.

The biodiversity convention entered into force on 29 December 1993 and the climate convention on 21 March 1994. Agenda 21 also asked for a treaty on desertification, and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification was adopted in June 1994. Together these three agreements are often called the Rio Conventions.

The first Conference of the Parties to the climate convention met in Berlin in 1995. Two years later, the parties adopted the Kyoto Protocol, which added the binding emission targets that Rio had left out.

Legacy

Later summits measured themselves against Rio. A special UN session in 1997 (Rio+5) found progress slow; the World Summit on Sustainable Development met in Johannesburg in 2002; and the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) returned to Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. Rio+20 launched the process that produced the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015.

Historians of environmental diplomacy generally see the Earth Summit as a turning point in framing rather than in immediate results. Global greenhouse gas emissions kept rising for decades after 1992, and deforestation continued. Yet the principles agreed in Rio, especially common but differentiated responsibilities and the precautionary approach, became the basic vocabulary of later negotiations, including the Paris Agreement of 2015.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1972, June: UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm creates UNEP.
• 1987: The Brundtland Commission publishes Our Common Future.
• 1989, December: The UN General Assembly decides to hold a conference on environment and development in 1992.
• 1992, 9 May: The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is adopted in New York.
• 1992, 22 May: The Convention on Biological Diversity is adopted in Nairobi.
• 1992, 3 June: The Earth Summit opens at Riocentro, Rio de Janeiro.
• 1992, 14 June: The conference closes after adopting the Rio Declaration, Agenda 21 and the Forest Principles.
• 1993, 29 December: The biodiversity convention enters into force.
• 1994, 21 March: The climate change convention enters into force.
• 2012, June: The Rio+20 conference returns to Rio de Janeiro.

Why it matters

The Earth Summit was the moment when the world’s governments formally accepted that environmental protection and economic development are linked problems that must be solved together. It produced the treaties under which climate change and biodiversity loss are still negotiated, and the idea of sustainable development that now appears in national laws, company reports and the UN’s global goals.