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June 14, 2002
Rio + 10 Series: A Brief History of the Earth Summits--From Rio to Johannesburg
by William Baue
SocialFunds.com presents a historical snapshot of the Rio Summit and surveys some significant
developments leading up to the Johannesburg Summit. (the second in a series of articles leading up
to the Johannesburg Summit)
SocialFunds.com --
A decade ago today, the second Earth Summit drew to a close in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Officially
known as the United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development, the Rio Summit was at the time the largest
international gathering ever, with 108 heads of state represented. The attendants generated
several significant documents, including the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, Agenda
21, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Although these documents have not all achieved universal ratification, they have served as
blueprints for the implementation of important sustainable development initiatives.
 The Rio Declaration
set forth 27 universally applicable principles of sustainable development. For example, Principle
16 states that the polluter should bear the cost of pollution, a notion with far-reaching economic
and environmental implications. Agenda 21 synthesized many of
the ideas promoted at the summit into the recognition that environmental change is driven by
population growth, overconsumption, and technology. The Framework Convention on Climate Change (which gave birth to the Kyoto
Protocol) and the Convention on Biological Diversity were
legally binding documents that required nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and to
protect plant and animal species, respectively.
The socially responsible investing (SRI)
community contributed to the Rio Summit by drafting the Rio Resolution on
Social Investment. The resolution comprised a set of recommendations to individuals,
companies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), financial institutions, and governments to support
sustainable development. The Rio Resolution was written by a consortium of social investors from
social investment trade organizations in the UK, the U.S., Canada, and Australia, and the
Europe-based International Association of Investors in the Social Economy (INAISE). The Resolution
represented the consortium's response to the mainstream business community's statement of principle
encapsulated in Changing Course, a book published by the Business Council for Sustainable
Development (BCSD).
"On behalf of the global SRI communities, we decided to come up with
something a bit more radical than Changing Course, focusing on what social investors should
be doing around poverty alleviation and sustainability," said Mark Campanale, associate director of
SRI business development at Henderson Global Investors, a
London-based investment firm. "It symbolized the first time the global social investment community
recognized itself as a movement with a purpose and a set of tools to critique traditional stock
market capitalism and mainstream financial institutions."
The values of the social
investment community mirror very closely the values promoted by the Earth Summits, which consider
economic development, social justice, and environmental protection to be inextricably linked. One
measure of the success of the last Earth Summit could therefore be whether the mainstream has
adopted SRI principles or if the SRI community has migrated toward the mainstream.
"The
answer is that the mainstream has moved closer to the SRI community," said Mr. Campanale. "For
example, the Rio Resolution is basically pasted into the London Principles of Sustainable Finance,
a new initiative on behalf of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair." The UK government will present the
London Principles at the Rio + 10 Summit in Johannesburg as a prototype for corporate sustainable
development practices.
One key question addressed by initiatives such as the London
Principles and others to be presented at Johannesburg, according to Mr. Campanale, is how the
global financial system can be altered to continually produce sustainable outcomes. Other key
questions include whether the global business community can address environmental degradation
quickly enough to prevent irreversible damage, and how corporate changes will affect shareowner
value. The negotiators at the Johannesburg Summit will try to answer these questions.
©
SRI World Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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