They also call for the creation of a global education fund, improvements in human rights, and more programs to empower women - all with the aim of overhauling economies.
The report says governments and international organizations “should work to create a new green revolution - an ‘ever-green revolution’ for the 21st century’’ by spending more on agricultural research, protecting imperiled plant and animal species, conserving land and water, and fighting pollution.
It also encourages the creation of regional oceans and coastal management bodies that protect world fisheries supplying 170 million jobs and daily protein for about one in five people on the planet.
Ban Ki-moon, the UN’s secretary-general, created the high-level, 22-member panel in August 2010 to focus on one of his top priorities by providing the UN Conference on Sustainable Development with a road map for its meeting in June at Rio de Janeiro. The panel is headed by Presidents Tarja Halonen of Finland and Jacob Zuma of South Africa. Other panel members include top officials from the United States, Russia, United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and some former world leaders.
The conference known as Rio+20 is a follow-up to the landmark 1992 Earth Summit in Rio that galvanized the global environmental movement.
It was at that gathering two decades ago that the world first agreed to accept voluntary controls on greenhouse gases. National leaders signed on to a treaty committing them to work “to protect the climate system for present and future generations.’’
Five years after Rio, negotiators added the Kyoto Protocol to the treaty. The Kyoto pact ordered cuts in emissions of heat-trapping cuts by 37 industrialized nations, but the United States rejected it. Subsequent climate summits have so far failed to craft a successor to Kyoto, which expires at the end of 2012.
Scientists have produced persuasive evidence that the carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases that industry, transport, and farming pour into the atmosphere are trapping heat and raising global temperatures.
The panel’s report, presented at an African Union meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is billed as a new blueprint for sustainable development and “low-carbon prosperity,’’ with 56 recommendations to help get those priorities mainstreamed into nations’ economic policies.
Jim Leape, director-general of Swiss-based WWF International, one of the world’s largest conservation groups, said the recommendations are “the highest-level political signal yet of greater readiness’’ by world leaders to transition away from fossil fuels.
But in a statement the group also criticized the UN report because it “fails to suggest any concrete, time-bound commitments for progress, leaving policies open to governments to implement as they saw fit.’’
