15 minute cities: 30 years in the making

UN's climate narrative reveals disturbing goals

- By Shane Fudge

CLIMATE change has been visible in government policy and in the media, to a greater or lesser degree, for around the last three decades.

While 1876 was the year that the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first proposed a human-influenced greenhouse gas effect on the earth, it was almost a century later that a growing environmental movement sparked the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972.

It was the first of a series of UN gatherings aimed at protecting the global commons from the environmental impacts of industrialization. Here, acid rain performed 'a dress rehearsal for global warming! Coincidentally, 1972 also saw the appearance of the Club of Rome-authored Limits to Growth - a report which made a direct link between resource depletion and degradation of the earth's carrying capacity and projected global population increases.

It was at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 where climate change was first outlined as a distinct environmental threat. To these ends, participants at the Rio summit first outlined a political and economic framework through which a) national governments could develop their own indigenous policies and b) begin a collaborative process through which countries could coordinate and mainstream sustainability objectives at a global level.

Central to these efforts was the emergence of Agenda 21-a four-phase, long-term action plan by which the UN would play a central role in coordinating global, national, and local level sustainability endeavours post 1992.

Local Agenda 21: Community Planning and Neighbourhood Renewal then became the finer level of detail on the role of local authorities, communities, and citizens in organising and delivering 'bottom up' environmental interventions.