Monday, 18 June 2012

BOOK LAUNCH - “ONLY ONE EARTH: THE LONG ROAD VIA RIO TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT”


By Felix Dodds and Michael Strauss with Maurice F. Strong
Routledge Publishing, June 2012
One_EarthNew book Only One Earth looks back over what has been achieved in the past forty years since the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, and ahead to what critically needs to happen at Rio+20 and beyond.  Written by Stakeholder Forum’s Executive Director, Felix Dodds, and Earthmedia’s Michael Strauss, with Maurice F. Strong, Former Secretary-General, “Earth Summit” [1992]; UN Conference on Human Environment [1972] and Executive Director, UNEP [1972-76].
This book we hope will enable a broad readership to understand the achievements in the area of environment and development over the past forty years and also what has not been realized. It looks to the challenges that we face forty years from Stockholm 1972, in particular in the areas of economics and governance, and the role of stakeholders. It puts forward a set of suggestions that the international community must address now and in the near future. It reminds us of the planetary boundaries we must all live within and what needs to be addressed in the next twenty years for democracy, equity and fairness to survive. Finally it proposes through the survival agenda a bare minimum of what needs to be done, arguing for a series of absolute minimum policy changes we need to change course on to a more sustainable one.
Quotes
“Rio+20 as a unique opportunity to make the “change-of-course” called for by business leaders at the Earth Summit in 1992. It requires fundamental changes in the way in which we manage the activities through which we impact on the Earth’s sustainability. This will require a degree of cooperation beyond anything we have yet experienced at a time when competition and conflict over scarce resources is escalating.”
Maurice F. Strong
“In the same way that banks succeeded at privatizing the profits and socializing the losses as they led the global economy to the brink of collapse, we are in danger of doing the same with the environment.  Humanity has taken a huge leap in the last decades and become a planetary-scale force – we need to behave as a global civilization if we are not to face catastrophic consequences.”
Felix Dodds (Observed in his role as Chair of the 2011 United Nations DPI-NGO Conference in Bonn)
(Video provided by UN News & Media)
            
(Photos provided by Environmental News Bulletin and Stakeholder Forum)
   
(Video provided by Stakeholder Forum)
Excerpts from 'Only One Earth' - Chapter 4 
UN radio interview with Felix Dodds on the hopes for Rio+20
Phone interviews can be arranged with the authors
To arrange a media interview, please contact Stakeholder Forum’s Communications Officer: Georgie Macdonald: Tel: +447411422581 or email: gmacdonald@stakeholderforum.org
Contacts
Georgie Macdonald  +447411422581 or  gmacdonald@stakeholderforum.org (London based)                
Anya Ruvinskaya  +1 718 407-0337 or  anya@earthmedia-summit.org (New York based)
More information
About the Rio+20 Conference
At the Rio+20 Conference, world leaders, along with thousands of participants from governments, the private sector, NGOs and other groups, will come together to shape how we can reduce poverty, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection on an ever more crowded planet to get to the future we want.
 The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) is being organized in pursuance of General Assembly Resolution 64/236 (A/RES/64/236), and will take place in Brazil on 20-22 June 2012 to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), in Rio de Janeiro, and the 10th anniversary of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg.
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