In advance of the Rio+20 Summit in Brazil next week, the United
Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released a 525-page report on
the health of the planet. In short, she’s really ill. The report
states, “Several critical global, regional and local thresholds
are close or have been exceeded ... Abrupt and possibly
irreversible changes to the life-support functions of the planet
are likely to occur." It was a very different time at the first
UN Earth Summit in 1992. Global awareness that human activity
was causing the destruction gave rise to the idea that nations
could come together and put forward global solutions to solve
the emerging crisis. This year, inside the formal negotiations,
member states are being driven towards adopting a paradigm,
deceptively called the “Green Economy.” The UNEP is promoting
the idea that we can only “save” nature by putting a price on
what nature “does” for humans. Global Exchange doesn’t believe
putting a price on nature is the path to protecting nature, and
we’ll be there to c