EARTHKEEPING NEWS A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY Volume Six, Number Six September/October 1997 RELINKING DEVELOPMENT TO ENVIRONMENT We have de-linked environment and development. If, as is believed, the development models used in recent decades have been unsustainable, or outright failures, can the 1992 Earth Summit come up with anything new, much less successfully link environment and development in creative ways? The overarching issue that most clearly highlights the North-South divide within the United Nations Conference on Enironment and Development (UNCED) is: What additional resources will be necessary to assure the implementation of sustainable development strategies, and to assure the enforcement of globally agreed upon environmental standards. At the Earth Summit, developing countries will present a huge environmental bill to industrialized nations. In March 1991, 34 Latin American and Caribbean countries met under the auspices of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). The conference document (The Tlatelolco Declaration) expresses the regional consensus that the countries of the North should bear the major financial cost of reversing environmental damage, "on the basis of their responsibility for the global process of environmental degradation...which is intimately linked to unsustainable models of development which have prevailed, especially in developed nations." Excerpted from Now Comes the Hard Part, by Michael McCoy, of US Citizens' Network on UNCED, and from Who Pays the Bill? by Mario de Cautin; UN Development Forum, page 9, May-June 1991; UN Dept. of Public Information, PO Box 5850, Grand Central Station, NYC 10163-5850. Home     Table of Contents