We have to make sure that the road from Rio is a fast track, if we are to realise our hope that the United Nations Earth Summit really was a quantum leap forward on that road to sustainable development. That it was concerned with the environment makes the event even more significant. But for many people, the outcome of the Rio conference was a disappointment. The high hopes and the fine rhetoric of politicians and major conservation figures resulted in no significant changes to the way we use the biosphere. We still cut down the rainforest and over fish the world's oceans.
Desertification continues unchecked.
There have been positive changes, many of which are visible only to the faceless civil servants in Brussels, Whitehall or the White House. The roles of the environmental planner and manager have changed while a whole new area of environmental auditing has developed to monitor the way in which we are treating our environment. One of the findings of the Rio Conference was that it became clear that we had insufficient information about the ways in which our biosphere worked. The claim was made that we knew more about the surface of the moon than we did about the surfaces beneath our oceans. Another outcome of Rio was the setting up of an Agenda 21.