ABSTRACT
June 1992. Representatives from over 180 governments met in Rio de Janeiro for the Earth Summit, the second United Nations Conference on Environment and Development.
Twenty years earlier the first UN conference on the Human Environment met in Stockholm. Widely pilloried as a dialogue of the deaf, the Stockholm conference fractured as developed countries asked poorer nations to clean up environmentally destructive development whilst the developing countries wished for economic growth, even if pollution and degradation were the price. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit risked a similar schism, with the developed world focusing on climate change, destruction of tropical forests and species loss, the developing world still desperate for economic improvement, but since Stockholm, two themes had emerged encouraging global empathy. First, in 1987 the Brundtland Report provided a defining moment, partly in response to the Stockholm fall out, promoting the concept of sustainable development. Second, the word biodiversity, scarcely heard of a decade before Rio, had a gained a global audience.
