The following is an overview of equity and rights-based language in the submissions of member states and inter-governmental organizations compiled by the Secretariat of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development 2012. They are organized according to major themes:
- Human rights in general;
- Rights over the access, management, and ownership of natural resources;
- Property and user rights;
- Right to food;
- Right to social services;
- Right to information;
- Women‟s rights;
- Workers‟ rights;
- Indigenous Peoples‟ Rights
- Rights to Self-determination
- Right to development
- Common but Differentiated Responsibility
- Social equity,
- Equitable economic development,
- Sustainable use of resources,
- Equitable access to resources,
- Equitable distribution of wealth, and
- Equity in global trade
This background document was prepared by Ibon International for the Workshop on Rights for Sustainability to be held at the UN Church Center, New York on January 24, 2012. It is intended as a reference paper for civil society organizations who wish to influence the negotiating positions of members states and promote a rights-based approach to sustainable development as a way of ensuring that inter- and intra-generational equity and justice are central concerns in the reform agenda at Rio+20 and beyond.
Equipo editorial
Earth Summiteers, find another path to the future, fast! The superhighway we are on is taking us down an attractive, effortlessly easy “primrose path” that could result in the ruination of everything we claim to be protecting and preserving. A planetary emergency looms in the offing.
Perhaps the human community is about to confront the worst of both worlds: the results of a human population explosion and a human population crash. The leviathan-like size of the human population in our time puts Earth’s finite resources and its frangible environs at risk because the exploding human population worldwide dissipates resources and pollutes the environment faster than the Earth can replenish itself for human benefit. As a consequence of the population explosion, many too many human beings are invited to engage in rapacious per capita consumption and unconscionable individual hoarding of Earth’s body, and recklessly degrading its ecology with pollutants. Soon to become patently unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human species appear to be fast approaching a point in human history when the monstrous size of the human population so overspreads the Earth that humankind ends up being the precipitant of an unimaginable sort of global ecological wreckage and a human population crash?
If the leaders and followers in the human community keep ignoring responsibilities and failing to perform duties in the face of emerging and converging, human-driven, global ecological challenges, then Mother Nature will most assuredly take matters into her own hands, according to well-established, immutable “rules of the house” (ie, laws of the biophysical world we inhabit). At some moment in space-time, perhaps sooner than any one of us imagines, children everywhere could ‘reap a whirlwind’ and confront a world similar to the one King (of many ancient petty kings and modern self-proclaimed masters of the universe) Ozymandias witnessed. When that time comes, perhaps the children will look back in anger and utter disbelief at the catastrophic ecological effects of unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities by the selfish elders, who are consciously turning a blind eye to expressions of intellectual honesty, moral courage and calls for bold action as well as abjectly losing the nerve required to acknowledge, address and overcome visible threats to human well being and environmental health in our time.
Malignant narcissism, pathological arrogance, plain foolhardiness, ideological idiocy and outrageous greed of a tiny minority and their many minions appear to be giving rise to a colossal global wreckage, the likes of which only Ozymandias has seen.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
Chapel Hill, NC
http://www.panearth.org/