The UN’s trade and development body has downgraded its global economic growth projection for 2022 to 2.6% from 3.6% due to the Ukraine war and to changes in macroeconomic policies made by countries in recent months. While Russia will experience a deep recession this year, significant slowdowns in growth are …
CONTRARY to what environmentalists may think, a prestigious United Nations report -- the World Investment Report (WIR), 1992 -- has virtually given a clean chit to multinational corporations (MNCs). It says there is very little evidence to show that MNCs shift environmentally dangerous industries to poor countries. But not all …
THE PROPOSED establishment of the Commission for Sustainable Development (SDC), hailed as "one of the quiet victories" of the Rio conference, is becoming a source of North-South contention that is expected to peak at the 47th session of the UN General Assembly in New York. Among the issues to be …
CORAL reefs in various parts of the world are getting bleached and scientists are debating whether this is an early warning of global warming, or simply a local warming of sea waters. Tom Goreau of the Global Reef Alliance says bleaching results from "expulsion by the coral of their symbiotic …
LEADERS of developing countries today find in environment a cause of great worldwide concern -- a concern that is steadily growing in their own countries and one that already has deep roots in the rich North. Political leaders from the South, who attended the recent 10th summit of the Non-Aligned …
THE EARTH summiteers who assembled at Rio in June this year have gone back to their respective countries. The hard preparatory work, the almost endless discussions to reach a consensus and the excitement of an earth summit are all over. One talks of a lull before a storm; but there …
THE FIRST World has just discovered the relationship between environment and indigenous people. This is the primary reason for putting indigenous people on the environmental agenda. They have realised that if the world's rainforests are in danger so are the forest's inhabitants. "If they go, so do the forests," says …
THE NISGA: are a proud people who live in the Naas river valley of northwestern British Columbia in Canada. Today, they are still attached to their land. Joseph Gosnell, a NISGA:, who was in Rio, puts it this way, "Ours is a land like no other. Rich in salmon, steelhead, …
NOT EVERYTHING was smooth sailing for the indigenous community in Rio. Shock and outrage gripped the community when Paulinho Paiacan, one of the chiefs of the Caiapo nation in the Brazilian Amazon region, was accused of having raped a white woman. Paiacan, incidentally, was the winner of the UN Environment …
THE RECENTLY-concluded Rio conference commemorated the 20th anniversary of the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment held at Stockholm. The Stockholm Conference was a watershed in the international environmenial movement - it put environmental issues on the international agenda for the first time. It was Sweden which had first …
THE ONE lasting reminder of the Rio conference will be the Commission on Sustainable Development, which is to be set up under the aegis of the United Nations to supervise the implementation of Agenda 21. There was much opposition to the idea of the commission from both southern and northern …
IN JUNE 1972, I was in Stockholm, at the UN Conference on the Human Environment. In June 1992, I was in Rio de Janeiro for the UN Conference on Environment and Development. What was the difference? Rio was bigger. In Stockholm, every meeting was within ten minutes' walking distance. Except, …
THE RIO Earth Summit was probably the biggest media event of any UN conference in history, much more so than the last big bash -- the women's conference at Nairobi. Women are only women, after all, but the earth is the mother of us all. Something like the fear of …
THAT America rules the waves became abundantly clear to me when I witnessed USA flex its muscles over the entire world at the last session of the Climate Change Convention. The UN was reduced to functioning as an extension of the US state department. And George Bush made a "neutered" …
