The High Stakes of Rio 20

Mr. John Hall, Manager, Corporate Relations, External Affairs, Rio Tinto, London, United Kingdom

1978 79 Brazilian Diplomatic Academy (Instituto Rio Branco), Brasilia

The author refers to Karttunen v. Finland, case No. 387 1989 and Gonzalez del Rio v. Peru, case No.

At least they paid some attention to the mounting scientific evidence. And certain principles set out in the 1992 Rio Framework Convention, including common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, were affirmed.

Previous positions include adviser responsible for the negotiation of trade agreements, Ministry of Finance Secretariat of Federal Income Tax and adviser, Companhia Vale do Rio Doce.

The panellist from Rio Tinto emphasized that there was no dichotomy between socio economic responsibility and building shareholder value.

This might seem surprising, because most countries south of the Río Bravo (known to North Americans as the Rio Grande) moved from right wing dictatorship to democracy in the 1980 s and 1990 s. Some of these democracies were initially imperfect, to be sure, but optimists hoped that it was only a matter of time until all elections would be fair and restrictions on civil liberties fully lifted.

As an example, we have the LGW Educational, Cultural and Community Center in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the José de Paiva Netto Institute in São Paulo, Alziro Zarur Home and Park in Glorinha, Rio Grande do Sul, and many other modern occupational school centres in Brazil.

NAIROBI With just weeks to go before the Rio 20 Earth Summit, many are speculating about how many world leaders will show up and what kind of agreements they might reach on the key agenda items creating a green economy and establishing an international framework for sustainable development. It is no coincidence that these two items appear side by side.

Filosofía y acción de la Compañía de Jesús en el Rio de La Plata en la época colonial, in Ignacio de Loyola, Magister Artium en París 1528 1535. Libro Homenaje de las Universidades del País Vasco y de la Sorbonne a Ignacio de Loyola en el V centenario de su nacimiento, Julio Caro Baroja and Antonio Beristain, Kutxa, Caja Gipuzkoa San Sebastián, Spain, 1991, pp. 257 264.

VIVAT members in Sao Paulo, Palmoplis, Vale do Jequetinhonh, Minas Gerais and Aparecida do Rio Negro in Brazil are striving to promote human life of those excluded by the society, namely, the street people, unemployed, victims of human trafficking and those living in extreme poverty.

Rio 20 is a moment for sharing knowledge and experience concerning successful transitions to greener and more resource efficient economies. It is an opportunity to begin developing the capacity at all levels to transform our economies into engines of growth and jobs that do not deplete our resources or create new liabilities that will be a drag on growth and human health for years to come.

The challenge ahead will be to reconcile the emerging economic reality with the social values and ethics needed to produce a balanced and inclusive green economy. That, in the words of UN Secretary General Ban Ki moon, is a future that we all want.

This June, thousands of activists, policymakers, and business people will converge on Rio de Janeiro for the third giant United Nations Sustainable Development Conference (Rio 20), whose theme is the green economy. The conference will unleash new arguments about green jobs, growth, cost increases, cost reductions, changes in values, consumer choice green this and green that.

Indeed, the deep and pervasive market failures in carbon emissions, biodiversity, and ecosystem services are accelerating environmental risks and ecological scarcities, and undermining human well being and social equity. That is why the link to governance and institutions at Rio 20 is just as important as the transition to a green economy markets are human constructs that require rules and institutions to guide not only their direction, but also their boundaries.

That crisis is located in Mexico, which is in freefall, its state institutions under threat as they have not been since at least the Cristero Uprising of the late 1920 s and possibly since the Mexican Revolution of 1910. While the Obama administration is obviously aware of what is happening south of the Rio Grande, the threat simply does not command the attention that its gravity requires.

Without a real and lasting solution that recalibrates our current economic thinking at a systemic level, the scale and pace of change could soon push the planet past critical thresholds and make sustainable development everywhere an impossible dream. Although multilateralism is a slow and often painful process of cultivating consensus, some issues are so large that they transcend any one country.

In the 22 years since the world signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Rio Earth Summit, there has been far too little progress toward real action. As a result, 2014 is now likely to be the warmest year in recorded history, a year that has also brought devastating droughts, floods, high impact storms, and heat waves.