12/05/2011
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon yesterday
(May 11) urged the world to must find ways
to bring global resource consumption and
the resulting environmental impact within
safe limits and called for international
cooperation in the effort to achieve sustainable
development.
"At the 1992 Earth
Summit in Rio de Janeiro, participants recognized
that unsustainable consumption and production
patterns form the biggest threat to the
Earth's capacity to satisfy human needs",
Mr. Ban told at the opening of the high-level
segment of the current session of the United
Nations Commission on Sustainable Development.
"A decade later,
in Johannesburg, Member States endorsed
a framework to support national and regional
efforts to promote sustainable consumption
and production. Yet, the challenge continues
to loom large", the Secretary-General
said in a message to the session, delivered
on his behalf by Sha Zukang, the Under-Secretary-General
for Economic and Social Affairs.
He said this year's
high-level segment of the Commission will
focus on a number of critical issues, including
chemicals, mining, transport and waste.
It will also consider a 10-year Framework
of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption
and Production Patterns.
"The sustainable
consumption and production agenda should
be viewed as a strategic priority that is
embedded in an appropriate institutional
framework", Mr. Ban added.
The need for the 10-year
framework was agreed upon at the high-level
meeting in Panama earlier this year, Mr.
Ban said, encouraging the Commission to
"mount a concerted response, conclude
negotiations on just such a framework, and
launch it without delay."
"This would be
an important contribution to the United
Nations Conference on Sustainable Development
in Rio [de Janeiro] next year", he
added.
Government ministers
from about 50 countries are attending the
high-level segment, which is designed to
give impetus to preparations for the Fourth
UN Conference on Sustainable Development,
or Rio+20, which will be held in the Brazilian
city in June 2012. Source: UN News Centre
at http://www.un.org/news
+ More
Humanity can and must
do more with less: UNEP Report
16/05/2011
By 2050, humanity could consume an estimated
140 billion tons of minerals, ores, fossil
fuels and biomass per year - three times
its current appetite - unless the economic
growth rate is "decoupled" from
the rate of natural resource consumption,
warns a new report from the United Nations
Environment Programme.
Developed countries
citizens consume an average of 16 tons of
those four key resources per capita (ranging
up to 40 or more tons per person in some
developed countries). By comparison, the
average person in India today consumes four
tons per year.
With the growth of both
population and prosperity, especially in
developing countries, the prospect of much
higher resource consumption levels is "far
beyond what is likely sustainable"
if realized at all given finite world resources,
warns the report by UNEP's International
Resource Panel.
Already the world is
running out of cheap and high quality sources
of some essential materials such as oil,
copper and gold, the supplies of which,
in turn, require ever-rising volumes of
fossil fuels and freshwater to produce.
Improving the rate of
resource productivity ("doing more
with less") faster than the economic
growth rate is the notion behind "decoupling",
the panel says. That goal, however, demands
an urgent rethink of the links between resource
use and economic prosperity, buttressed
by a massive investment in technological,
financial and social innovation, to at least
freeze per capita consumption in wealthy
countries and help developing nations follow
a more sustainable path.
The trend towards urbanization
may help as well, experts note, since cities
allow for economies of scale and more efficient
service provision. Densely populated places
consume fewer resources per capita than
sparsely populated ones thanks to economies
in such areas as water delivery, housing,
waste management and recycling, energy use
and transportation, they say.
"Decoupling makes
sense on all the economic, social and environmental
dials", says UN Under Secretary-General
Achim Steiner, UNEP's Executive Director.
Source: United Nations Environment Programme
