Green theatrics are now part of every world climate summit like the robe to a gala, yes to climate protection in general, which is why the eyes will be on Stockholm and Rio de Janeiro long before the next UN climate summit in Sharm El-Sheikh. The latter could then become the setting for a special kind of ecological ceremony. “Rioplus30” is to be used to resume what was then known as the “Earth Summit”. With him, the then Christian Democratic Chancellor and reunification hero Helmut Kohl made a name for himself as a co-founder, but not much more. Because reality, which was at best mottled with green, quickly caught up with everyday life in the Federal Republic of Germany. As soon as it was to Stockholm,where the United Nations convened a global environmental summit for the first time in the first half of June - almost exactly half a century before Rioplus30. A total of 112 countries had traveled to the Swedish capital at that time, China was not there.
Joachim Müller-Jung
Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Nature and Science” section.
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The environmental awareness that was awakening in many countries resulted in a Stockholm Declaration that a clean environment should be understood as a human right. The echo of this non-binding diplomatic slogan will be heard again in the coming year in the most varied of facets. After all, it cannot be said that the global environmental problems that were already discussed at the time could be solved with the numerous committees and conferences that have now been set up. The greatest success to date was undoubtedly achieved with the “Montreal Protocol”. The deadly depletion of the ozone layer in the atmosphere was halted with the ban on the most harmful CFC-containing industrial products. But overall the ecological crisis of the planet did not get any smaller, on the contrary, the key figures for intact nature, air,Water and organisms kept moving into the red area. At least diplomatically, the Rio Conference stopped this downward trend by presenting a whole compendium of environmental policy intentions with “Agenda 21” and almost half a dozen environmental and nature conservation conventions - including the UNFCCC Framework Convention on Climate Change. The ecological reality lags behind that to this day.
So what can be expected after the World Environment Conference in Stockholm and the Earth Summit in Rio on the Master in this double anniversary year? It's actually a triple. With the World Summit for Sustainable Development in 2002, around twenty thousand diplomats in Johannesburg once again pledged to ensure the long-term maintenance of the planet. For the first time concrete figures were given and “Millennium Development Goals” were written down. In 2010 the decline in biodiversity should be "drastically reduced", in 2012 the protection of the seas to ten percent of the oceans should be ensured, in 2015 the number of the poor worldwide should be reduced by half a billion and by 2020 the environmental and health damage caused by chemicals should be "minimized" . None of this has been achievedand therefore all of this should be put on the agenda again at the Rioplus30 summit. Only the mission statement - “sustainability” - seems to have survived the Johannesburg action plan undamaged.
In fact, today nothing works in environmental policy or in business without the concept of sustainability, and perhaps it is precisely this ubiquitous use of this formula that is the reason why everyone suddenly has the environment on their toes. If you want to make society economically or socially sustainable, you have to put ecological sustainability on your to-do list. Basically, it is all about stability: stable environment, stable resources, stable systems. And nothing symbolizes the threatening ecological instability more than the climate crisis, the solution of which was already being scientifically debated at the time of the Stockholm UN summit, but only really got off the ground as a global humanity project with the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.For this reason alone, the Rioplus30 summit in June will be all about climate-related disasters. Not without good reason: the collapse in climatic stability has now become the only common denominator at every environmental, economic and security summit of the almost two hundred UN states. As the evaluation of more than a hundred thousand scientific publications has recently shown, man-made global warming is now noticeable for 85 percent of humanity.man-made global warming can now be felt by 85 percent of humanity.man-made global warming can now be felt by 85 percent of humanity.
But people are even better at repressing and shifting than at feeling. Even the two dozen countries in the world that are seen as pioneers of sustainable climate policy with their constant emission reductions - including 22 countries from Europe, including Germany - are still not on a path below two degrees of maximum warming compared with the pre-industrial era . “Coal”, the main source of historical climate pollution, was mentioned as the core of the solution for the first time ever at the climate summit in Glasgow that year. Everything goes too slowly in the fossil age, at the same time almost everything becomes politically more complicated. The north-south conflict is not diminishing with the growing and competing influence of China and India, the “rule book” for the Paris climate goals.But the window closes. If the global trend reversal is not finally achieved in this decade, almost immediately, and we will certainly agree at the great palaver of RioPlus30, environmental diplomacy faces almost insoluble tasks for planetary management.