Zeitschrift für Ökosystem und Ökologie

Abstrakt

Earth Summit: From Rio 1992 via Kyoto and Copenhagen, Back to Rio 2012

Farah Bani Affan

In early 1980s, a journal entitled 'Mountain Research and Development' flourished concerning 'sustainable development', in which cooperation at the regional and global levels among countries has launched, promoting it to become a highly significant tool for communicating. As a 'tool for communicating' the journal has attracted and gathered its scientific and political members with many countries 178 nations into the largest conference of the United Nations on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the 'Earth Summit', at Rio de Janeiro in 1992. A series of global meetings have been held since, regarding environmental issues, hopefully to reduce greenhouse emissions and protect the environment. The aim of this paper is to outline the main facts which have been discussed in four main conferences starting from Rio 1992, via Kyoto 1997, Copenhagen 2009, and ending up after 20 years at Rio for the second time. Due to the word limitation, this essay has focused on the climate change and environmental protection, whereas conserving biological diversity along with Agenda 21 has been left for future researches.