The December 2012 edition of UNEP's Global Environmental Alert Service (GEAS) describes where progress has been made, and where it is lacking, toward achieving global environmental goals and objectives, and outlines recommendations for improving progress.
December 2012: The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Global Environmental Alert Service (GEAS) has released the December 2012 edition of its Bulletin, which focuses on measuring progress toward global environmental goals (GEGs) and identifying gaps.
The Bulletin, which has an environmental governance theme, highlights the proliferation of more than 500 international environmental agreements since 1972, the year of the Stockholm Conference and the establishment of UNEP. These include conventions on biodiversity, hazardous wastes, climate change and more. Despite such agreements, the Bulletin notes, the global environmental situation has continued to deteriorate.
Citing the fifth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-5) report, and its companion publication “Measuring Progress: Environmental Goals and Gaps,” GEAS says many of the goals and objectives contained in the “vast majority” of global environmental agreements are “aspirational” in nature as well as lacking in specific targets and available data.
Building on the outcomes of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20), the Bulletin concludes with recommendations for how the international community could make progress on GEGs and achieve sustainable development, including by, inter alia: establishing clear and measurable targets covering a broader range of environmental challenges; promoting the use of common standards for data collection and analysis; increasing data sharing; building capacity to strengthen environment statistics and other data; and harnessing new technologies to effectively communicate environmental information to policy makers and the public. [Publication: UNEP Global Environmental Alert Service, December 2012]