The Guardian, February 2012. Bas de Leeuw, Managing Director at the World Resources Forum (WRF), calls on Rio+20 to focus on embedding sustainable economic targets and measurements. He presents the expectations of the WRF in a video, published by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) on the website of the Guardian.
Watch his recommendations for Rio+20 here (video).
The Earth Summit is only the fourth conference of its kind in history, De Leeuw observes. The only other global conferences on Environment or Sustainable Development at Heads of State level were in 1972 – when UNEP was born – in 1992 Rio, where Agenda 21 was established, still a major guideline document, and in 2002, Johannesburg, where Sustainable Consumption and Production was introduced. “So let us hope that this year the Green Economy can be put on the map”, he says.
Major policy recommendations of the World Resources Forum, as included in its official input to the conference, are to establish a clear roadmap, since “you cannot manage what you cannot measure” and getting the prices right, a “major shift from taxation from labour to resources. “