Only One Earth: The Long Road via Rio to Sustainable Development

Forty years after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the goal of sustainable development continues via the Rio+20 conference in 2012. This book will enable a broad readership to understand what has been achieved in the past forty years and what hasn’t. It shows the continuing threat of our present way of living to the planet. It looks to the challenges that we face twenty years from the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, "The Earth Summit," in Rio, in particular in the areas of economics and governance and the role of stakeholders. It puts forward a set of recommendations that the international community must address now and in the the future. It reminds us of the planetary boundaries we must all live within and 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 move forward.

Felix Dodds is the Executive Director of Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future. He has been active at the UN since 1990 and set up three global NGO coalitions for UN Conferences, Summits and Commissions, including the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. He is the author or editor of several books, including How to Lobby at Intergovernmental Meetings and Climate Change and Energy Insecurity. 

Michael Strauss is Executive Director of Earth Media, an independent political and communications consultancy based in New York. Michael serves as media consultant and advisor to governments, UN agencies and civil society coalitions. For the Rio+20 Summit in 2012, he was designated Civil Society/ Media Liaison by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). He has served as media coordinator for NGO coalitions since the lead-up to the 1992 'Earth Summit', and has worked extensively with NGOs, Trade Unions, Youth, Women, Indigenous Peoples, Local Authorities at the UN Commission on Sustainable Development in New York. 

Maurice Strong served as Secretary-General of both the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm, 1972), which launched international negotiations on environmental issues and led to the establishment of UNEP, and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development ('The Earth Summit', 1992, Rio de Janeiro). He was the first Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). He has played a unique and critical role in globalizing the environmental movement, as part of an extraordinary career that spanned both business and public service in the fields of international development, the environment, energy and finance. The trail that he pioneered has continued to the Rio+20 conference of 2012.