Ecology and Environment

The 2012 edition of the Right Livelihood Awards, the alternative Nobel Prizes, have been announced in Sweden today. According to the Jury, the “2012 Laureates define essential conditions for global peace and security.” The awards are made by the Right…

Should it answer to conference sponsors Samsung and the Korean government, or to its historical mission to protect the environment and social justice? The world’s largest and oldest conservation organization, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, is holding its…

“Here the situation is really tense. Heavy contingent of police being deployed. Police have stopped public transport. Sand bags are at the entry points of the Tirunelveli district coastal villages including Idinthakarai. Vehicles are screened. Normal life is heavily disrupted.…

The ATOM Project, an exciting new initiative to build global support for nuclear abolition, was launched at a parliamentary assembly in Astana, Kazakhstan on 29 August, the International Day Against Nuclear Tests. The project, entitled Against Testing Our Mission (ATOM),…

Four people dead, many injured and a priest battered by the police following massive protests in Cajamarca, Peru, are just the tip of the iceberg. Conga gold mine threatens the water of four lakes. The same story repeats throughout several Latin American countries. Multinationals (surprise, surprise!) are involved. Financial crisis fuels Gold (and other minerals) Rush

The UN Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+20 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit with expressions of deep disappointment from broad sections of members of the media and the environmental NGOs, who saw little new commitments to action in the final text that was adopted by the heads of states and governments and their senior officials.

Luc Gnacadja has rock-solid reason to be upbeat: some 100 heads of state agreed at the Rio+20 – to strive for “a land-degradation neutral world”, characterised by zero growth in desertification.
In doing so they were responding to the UNCCD’s clarion call in a “policy brief” for ‘A Sustainable Development Goal for Rio+20: Zero Net Land Degradation’.

The final document of the Summit of the peoples summarizes the main points discussed during plenary sessions and meetings, as well as express the intense mobilization that occurred during this period that point of convergence around the structural causes and false solutions, solutions to the crises facing the people, as well as the main axes of struggle for the next period.

At the Global Media Forum, organised by Deutsche Welle and currently underway in Bonn, Germany, Pressenza director, Pia Figueroa was invited to participate on a panel on the theme of sustainability education. “We are convinced that until development is from all and for all human beings, violent conditions that put at risk social as well as personal life will persist.”

We publish here the official document, in its final version that was worked and agreed by the delegations present at the Rio+20 Summit and that only the Heads of State could modify directly. As our correspondents in Brazil reported, it only remains the act of formalization of its approval during the official summit meeting.