UN General Assembly
2003

of the environment and the need to preserve natural resources. Sustainable development, as a cohesive development of the socio-economic field and the environment, has become a priority of most democracies throughout the world, especially after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. As the head of the Estonian delegation to the Conference, I signed Agenda 21 and the Framework Conventions on Climate Change and Biological Diversity. Eleven years have passed since the Rio de Janeiro Conference. Considering developments since then, we see that some progress in global environmental cooperation among States has taken place. New goals were set and interim conclusions made at the special session of the General Assembly in New York in 1997 and at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. The General Assembly session in 2000 agreed on the Millennium Declaration, with the main goal set as environmental sustainability. However, we must note that the world’s population has grown by 1 billion since the Rio de Janeiro Conference in 1992. In the 1990s, the world