Welcome (or not) to Rio Centro

by nathan thanki Today marked the first day of the "Third Preparatory Committee meeting to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development." That basically just means that negotiators have a few days to finalise all the details of the outcome document (the offensively titled "Future We Want"). Things just got kicked up a gear. These past few days had been spent getting our...

Responding to Youth Blast questions

by nathan thanki On the second morning of the international section of the #youthblast, the organisers asked those gathered as the Major Group for Children and Youth (the official Youth constituency for this UN process) a series of "questions you were always too afraid to ask" about Rio+20. As a group we hesitantly attempted to answer the following:   What do we do after Rio? How...

Achim Steiner, Youth Development and the Future of Exploitation for the Natural World

  by Bogdan Zymka Achim Steiner is the Executive Director of United Nations Environment Programme. His background includes international development and enviornmnetal policy.  “The environment usually loses to talks of economics.” Steiner was greeted with quiet applause when he arrived for his impromptu visit to the Youth Blast, (a space designated to voice the concerns of...