Economic and Social Development

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (also known as Earth Summit), held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was the first meeting of world leaders to comprehensively address the interlinked global problems of environmental degradation and socio-economic underdevelopment. The Summit’s participating leaders endorsed the Rio Declaration and adopted Agenda 21, a comprehensive plan of action aiming at delivering the message of the urgent need for sustainable development, to the world, for the 21st century.

The efforts undertaken for the implementation of Agenda 21 paved the way towards gradual inclusion of the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development into governmental policy-planning and policy-making at the national, regional and international levels, while its follow-up contributed to the wide spread acceptance and adoption of an integrated, cross-sectoral and participatory approach to sustainable development.

Ten years later, in 2002, the leaders of the world gathered again, at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, to review Agenda 21 and “the Programme for the Further Implementation of Agenda 21”, that is, Agenda 21’s mid-term review, prepared by the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), a functional organ of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which bares the bulk of the work for sustainable development within the UN system.  A number of certain concrete goals, in line with the existing ones, for the promotion of sustainable development had also found its place at the Millennium Declaration, adopted in 2000 by the Millennium Summit.

In Johannesburg, the international community acknowledged the continuous severity of existing socio-economic and environmental conditions and the constraints states, especially developing ones, faced in implementing Agenda 21 and decided to adopt the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPoI), which sought to expedite the realization of the objectives set by Agenda 21 and urge countries to achieve tangible results in specified time-bound targets and internationally agreed goals.