Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to the regulation of hunting and fishing. In 1953, the American conservationist Henry
Fairfield Osborn wrote that “man is becoming aware of the limits of his earth” (Adams
back by the Apollo missions, may also have triggered a change in attitude to the global
environment. Frank Boormann, commander of the Apollo 8 mission wrote, “When you are
privileged to view the earth from afar … you realise that we are really, all of us around
the world, crew members on the space station Earth” (Adams
2004
, 154). The image
of the fragile blue planet suspended in dark space became an icon of the environmental
movement.
Responding to the growing concerns about the future of 'development', the UN
established a World Commission on the Environment and Development in 1984. Known
as the Brundtland Commission after its chairperson, former Norwegian prime minister Gro
Harlem Brundtland, the commission spent three years gathering data for its report, entitled
with the same sense of urgency as war and poverty - as global threats to human existence
- the report softened the Cassandra warnings of
The Limits to Growth
. Rather than
decry economic growth per se, the report stressed the need to change the quality of
growth by incorporating environmental concerns in economic decision making. In doing
so, it proposed an alternative paradigm: sustainable development. It defined this as
“development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of
moment when environmentalism entered the boardrooms of business and government.
Building on
Our Common Future
, the UN convened a conference on development
and the environment in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. No such event had taken place
before. More than 20,000 people, representing governments, industry, and a variety of
nongovernmental organisations, participated directly or indirectly in what was somewhat
grandiosely dubbed the 'Earth Summit'. One hundred and forty-four heads of state or
government attended, as did 10,000 journalists. Perhaps its sheer scale raised expectations
too high, for the Rio Summit did not produce the bold Earth Charter that was hoped for.
However, two specific and legally binding agreements did emerge from the summit: the
Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty to cooperatively consider what the
international community can do to limit climate change, and to cope with whatever impacts
which,operativesince2005,committedindustrialized countriestoreducingtheircollective
emissions of GHGs by 5.2 per cent by 2012, compared with 1990 levels.
