Johannesburg follow up: the Eleventh Session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development
The first global meeting on sustainable development since the
Johannesburg Summit last year will take place at United Nations Headquarters in New York from April 28 through May 9, 2003. This is the
Eleventh Session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD11) where governments, NGOs, UN agencies, major groups, private sector and political leaders, including ministers with portfolios such as environment, water, agriculture, and energy, will come together to discuss what has been achieved in terms of sustainable development since the Johannesburg Summit and how to proceed in the future.
The Johannesburg Summit (World Summit on Sustainable Development), organized by the United Nations in August 2002, brought the international community together to review how well countries, international organizations and civil society had managed to implement targets agreed on at the
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (also called the first Earth Summit) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ten years earlier in 1992. At the first Earth Summit, more than 100 heads of state lay down a global framework for the implementation of sustainable development through as series of agreements, including an agenda -
Agenda 21 - aimed to address urgent problems of environmental protection and socio-economic development at national, regional and international levels.
Two global summits on sustainable development have been organized by the United Nations since the first Earth Summit to evaluate progress on implementation of sustainable development:
Earth Summit + 5, held in New York in 1997, and Earth Summit + 10 in 2002 (or Rio + 10) also referred to as the Johannesburg Summit mentioned above. At these summits, there has been broad agreement that progress has been disappointing: poverty has deepened and environmental degradation worsened. As a consequence, the Johannesburg Summit aimed at laying grounds for a new and more action-oriented approach through the establishment of a number of targets, timetables and commitments for the promotion of sustainable development.
The task of the upcoming Eleventh Session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development will be to review this new approach. Each year, since the first Earth Summit, the
United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) has organized such a session, the aim being to review - and plan future work on - the implementation of sustainable development at all levels. However, this year's session has a special role to play as it is expected to produce concrete guidelines for how the new, more action-focused approach can be implemented. This will involve discussions on which implementation actors (governments, international organizations, major groups, partnerships, etc.) should do what at which level (international, national, regional). The session will include a series of multi-stakeholder dialogues, inter-active discussions, and inter-active ministerial roundtables between governments, major groups, UN agencies non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international inter-governmental Organizations (IGOs).
Click
here to see the programme of the 11th session of CSD.
Read the Network's interviews and articles on the Johannesburg Summit (WSSD) published in June, August, and October 2002:
World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg 26 August - 4 September 2002:
http://www.rdfs.net/news/events/0206ev/0206ev_wssd_en.htm
Interview with Eve Crowley, Task Manager for Chapter 14 of the Rio Agenda on "Promotion of sustainable agriculture and rural development":
http://www.rdfs.net/news/interviews/0208in/0208in_crowley_en.htm
Interviews with Thomas Forster and Peter Hurst, representatives of civil society organizations on the role of civil society in the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg:
http://www.rdfs.net/news/interviews/0208in/0208in_foster-hurst_en.htm
WSSD: 10 Statements on Sustainable Development (October 2002):
http://www.rdfs.net/news/interviews/0210in/0210in_quotesWSSD_en.htm
