The Rise and Fall of Global Climate Policy: Stockholm to Rio 1992, Rio + 20 and Beyond

Reconciling competing resource needs with respect to maintaining lifestyles and eradication of poverty is at the core of the climate negotiations, and the global biophysical limits to growth should mean lifestyle changes not depriving the poor. With prospects for legally binding commitments fading, new rules to establish national carbon budgets, shifting the focus from flows to stocks of carbon in the atmosphere, will be more scientific and lead to sustainability of our common wellbeing. The way the issue of global environmentalism is now being framed around modifying longer term trends in consumption and production patterns may succeed in securing international cooperation in a manner that the focus on percentage reductions in greenhouse gases, that considered symptoms rather than the causes of climate change, was not able to achieve. The unresolved issue is whether in writing its own urban future China will shape an alternative global vision. Redistribution has so far been kept out of the agenda of the United Nations, and new global goals and rules to share both responsibility and prosperity can lead to a new world order.