International Environment Forum

Policy-making today is too often governed by political expediency and the pressures of vested interests. Governments pay lip service to declarations of principles, but seldom consider their relevance to “the real world”. The UN has adopted ethical principles in the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Rio Declaration, Article 3 of the United Nationas Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) and other instruments, but too often they remain as generalities and their implications are not sufficiently considered in policy and decision-making. Paragraph 6 of the WSSD Plan of Implementation on the importance of ethics for sustainable development requires further action to be effective. Civil society has also completed drafting of the Earth Charter after the failure to agree on a text in Rio in 1992.