CMBD Perspectives — “Imagination Is More Important than Knowledge” (Albert Einstein)
The Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development is upon us, promising to deliver “The Future We Want”, and the Internet is delivering an information overload that makes it difficult to screen out the fluff from the real nuggets for that future. The main event, the Summit itself, has an ever-changing “outcomes” document with a daunting menu of general and sector-specific provisions that are yet to be finalized by member-state governments, surrounded by the “Major Groups” of legitimately organized special interests – NGOs, women, youth, local governments, business and industry, labour. Some parallel activities are multi-sectoral – such as the “Rio+20 Dialogues” allowing web-based participants to vote on priorities to be submitted to the Summit and the First GLOBE Summit of Legislators allowing parliamentarians to submit a “legislative protocol” to their own governments, as it were. Others are more geared toward special interests – such as the “People’s Summit” and the “Leaders Forum on the Future Women Want” and the “Corporate Sustainability Forum”. In this week’s CMBD News we take a look at some of the nuggets we expect to see in the main event, as well as some of the fluff in the side events that could actually become the seeds of future nuggets for that “future we want”, as well as a look at another “20” event, the G20 Leaders Summit further north in the Western Hemisphere, in Los Cabos, Mexico, where a B20 – or multiple variations thereof – vies for institutional continuity within a Mexican salsa of Y20 (youth), L20 (labor), Think20 (think tanks) and a G20 Civil Society Dialogue!
From the CMBD News 11 June 2012
Tags: B20, Corporate Sustainability Forum, G20, Globe summit, L20, People's Summit, Rio+20, Y20