1992

Rio Earth Summit

In 1987, the United Nations Brundtland Report (« Our Common Future ») laid the foundations for sus-tainable development, based on three pillars: the environment, society and the economy. The following year saw the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which published its first report in 1990, establishing a link between human greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

These two events led the United Nations to organise the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which yielded agreements on protecting biodiversity and fighting global warming, with the introduction of the Agenda 21 action programme. This programme established recommendations to tackle a wide variety of problems ranging from housing and ocean management to desertification. In 2012, the Rio +20 Earth Summit took place with the aim of reviewing the achievements of the previous summits and establishing what still had to be done. The priorities laid down by the United Nations are the green economy and the eradication of poverty.