Green Economy | Greenpeace Blogs

by Daniel Mittler

Like so many in Greenpeace, I love boats. Put me on water and I am happy. So when I heard back in March at one of the preparatory meetings for the Rio Earth Summit taking place in New York that our new Rainbow Warrior was there, I just had to visit. And today I made the trek again to see the Rainbow Warrior, as she had just arrived in Rio de Janeiro for the final preparatory meetings for the Earth Summit. It was an honor to brief some of our activists and volunteers about the Earth Summit tonight. The crew onboard is the one that managed to hold a “Rio+20: bla bla bla or action?” banner on an anchor chain in the Amazon just weeks ago.

It was great, though, to be able to share at least a little bit of good news with the crew. The European Union, Brazil and other countries who want to make sure that Rio+20 is the beginning of the end of the Wild West exploitation of our oceans are standing firm here in Rio. We hope that is not just talk, as future generations need healthy oceans if they are to survive. You can support marine reserves now by adding your voice to the hundreds of thousands of people who want a future of living oceans. We will be presenting these signatures to those who need to hear your voice in the coming days. Continue reading →

by Daniel Mittler

If you believe the United Nations pr ess release, a lot was achieved at last week’s “informal” negotiations for Rio+20: “Before the negotiations, only 6 per cent of the text had been agreed upon. Now, that number has jumped to more than 20 per cent, with many additional paragraphs close to agreement.” So what? you may rightly ask. Not only because that leaves a disturbing amount of work to be done before world leaders arrive in Rio on June 20th, but mainly because we judge Earth Summit by how much they achieve for people and planet. The number of paragraphs which have been diluted enough to be agreeable to all is neither here nor there.

There was one bit of good news from last week: The launch of a High Seas Biodiversity Agreement is still possible at Rio. We never found out why the Co-Chair had ignored the vast majority of countries calling for such an agreement in the draft published May 22nd. But we thank Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Maldives, Nauru, Micronesia, India, Chile, Trinidad & Tobago, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Philippine, Fiji, Barbados, Uruguay, the European Union and Monaco for standing up for our oceans and the future last week. What governments must do at Rio is simple: They need to agree on paragraph Oceans 6 Alt 1 (including all the things currently still in “brackets”). Let the US, Canada, Russia, Japan, Iceland, Korea and Norway not stop the rest of the world from making this urgent step towards ending the Wild West exploitation of over 64% of the world´s oceans.

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