The environmental concerns growing in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s increased internationally as well. Perhaps the biggest impetus for developing a worldwide effort to monitor and restrict global pollution is the fact that most forms of pollution do not respect national boundaries. The first major international conference on environmental issues was held in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972 and was sponsored by the United Nations (UN). This meeting, at which the United States took a leading role, was controversial because many developing countries were fearful that a focus on environmental protection was a means for the developed world to keep the undeveloped world in an economically subservient position. The most important outcome of the conference was the creation of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). UNEP was designed to be "the environmental conscience of the United Nations," and, in an attempt to allay fears of the developing world, it became the first UN agency to be headquartered in a developing country, with offices in Nairobi, Kenya. In addition to attempting to achieve scientific consensus about major environmental issues, a major focus for UNEP has been the study of ways to encourage sustainable development-increasing standards of living without destroying the environment. At the time of UNEP's creation in 1972, only 11 countries had environmental agencies. Ten years later that number had grown to 106, of which 70 were in developing countries. A growing number of international agreements have been reached in an effort to improve the world's environmental status. In 1975 the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) went into effect with the goal of reducing commerce in animals and plants on the edge of extinction. In 1982 the International Whaling Commission agreed to a moratorium on all commercial whaling. Perhaps the most important international agreement was the 1987 Montréal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. For the first time, an international pact was signed that set specific targets for reducing emissions of chemicals responsible for the destruction of the earth's ozone layer. The international community again came together in 1989 to limit the movement of hazardous wastes among countries. Twenty years after the Stockholm Conference, the UN Conference on Environment and Development was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. Popularly known as the Earth Summit, this meeting was the largest gathering of world leaders in history. The conference produced two major treaties. The first was an agreement to reduce emission of gases leading to global warming, and the second was a pact on biodiversity requiring countries to develop plans to protect endangered species and habitats. At the insistence of the United States, however, the final version of the global warming treaty was dramatically scaled back. The United States was also one of the very few countries that refused to sign the biodiversity treaty. United States representatives objected to a part of the treaty that specified that money to come from the use of natural resources from protected ecosystems, such as rain forests, should be shared equally between the source country and the corporation or institution removing the materials. The 1992 agreement on global warming limits each industrialized nation to emissions in the year 2000 that are equal to or below 1990 emissions. However, these limits are voluntary and no enforcement provisions were included in the agreement. By 1997 the fact that the goals would not be met was clear. At a follow-up conference in Kyôto, Japan, representatives from 160 countries signed a new agreement, known as the Kyôto Protocol. This agreement calls for the industrialized nations to reduce emissions to an average of about 5 percent below 1990 emission levels and to reach this goal between the years 2008 and 2012. A desire for environmental change led to the creation of various political parties around the world whose emphasis was largely on environmental protection. The first of these organizations, collectively known as green parties, was the Values Party in New Zealand, created in 1972. By far the most successful has been the green party of West Germany, Die Grunen, which in 1983 won nearly 6 percent of the seats in the West German Parliament. Green parties have developed in almost all countries that have open elections, but they have had the largest impact in those nations where proportional representation within a parliamentary system occurs. Thus, the green parties have not played a significant role in American politics. In 1993, 23 green parties from eastern and western Europe came together to form the European Federation of Green Parties, with the hope that together they would have the leverage necessary to demand that environmental issues such as pollution control, population growth, and sustainable development be more fully addressed by various national governments and international bodies.
changes concerns countries ecology extinct home location movement problems radiation dragonballz
