Barcelona Consensus Goes Rio +20

Barcelona Consensus will be present at this year’s People’s Summit at Rio+20 for Social and Environmental Justice taking place contemporarily as the United Nation’s Conference on Sustainable Development.

“The Rio + 20 Summit is a unique opportunity for governments to engage in a transition towards a just, sustainable and viable world for everyone. The current situation is unacceptable: the system we live in is structurally violent, inequitable and unsustainable. What we are missing is an ethical view with a focus on the common good instead of the current governments who lead our world into an alarming state of poverty and destruction. The breadth and depth of the current crises is the interface of a deeper crisis of conscience and human responsibility. These crises demonstrate openly the limits to growth of this finite world and the speculative markets. These crises cause a growing deficit of trust in government and create a groundswell of indignation among the people.” (Samir Abi, Africa Coordinator of Barcelona Consensus)

The system based on the Washington Consensus has lead us into this position and it is high time we shared the ideas of the Barcelona Consensus with the world: an intercultural alternative to the system we live in. The Summit in Rio is a good opportunity for us to make our voices heard and actively influence the destiny of the world. That is why the Barcelona Consensus will be present at this year’s People’s Summit at Rio+20 for Social and Environmental Justice taking place contemporarily as the United Nation’s Conference on Sustainable Development (June 15-23). The people’s summit is the space where those are heard who live with the impact of the unsustainable practices of the world’s governments, where those can speak who have real solutions for the impasse we are living today.

Rio +20 is crucial and it has a large legacy. The leaders who attend this year’s meeting will tread in the footsteps of the famous Earth Summit held 20 years ago in the same location. Five years before the conference the Brundtland Report had introduced the notion of sustainability, which gained momentum during the Rio conference. The Agenda 21 drafted at the summit presented itself as a guideline to sustainable development and alternatives to fossil fuels. For the first time, biological diversity and the climate were on political and public agenda. The Earth Summit also mainstreamed the idea of the precautionary principle and paved the way for the Kyoto Protocol. What about this year’s meeting, will it be a similar turning-point? Most agree at this point that the world’s leaders’ meeting is bound to fail. Rio+20 won’t solve the environmental problems we are facing today – simply because it does not address these problems.

Find out more about this topic and the fight against the commodification of nature on the website of the Alliance for an ecological, social and urgent alternative to capitalisme. 

Tomorrow we will tell you more about the presence of Barcelona Consensus in Rio.