Girl’s Speech @ UN Conference on Environment and Development
The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Rio Summit, Earth Summit (or, in Portuguese, Eco ’92) was a major conference held in Rio de Janeiro from June 3 to June 14, 1992. 178 governments participated, with 118 sending their heads of state or government.Some 2400 representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) attended, with 17000 people at the parallel NGO Forum, who had so-called Consultative Status. The issues addressed included: *systematic scrutiny of patterns of production — particularly the production of toxic components, such as lead in gasoline, or poisonous waste; *alternative sources of energy to replace the use of fossil fuels which are 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 smog; *the growing scarcity of water. An important achievement was an agreement on the Climate Change Convention which in turn led to the Kyoto Protocol. Another was agreement to “not 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 money supply measures that did not inherently encourage destruction of natural ecoregions and so-called uneconomic growth. Twelve cities were …
