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Description
In the midst of the current international debate on global warming, it is instructive to note that it has taken the United Nations and the international community some two generations to reach this point.
To fully understand the current debate, one must look at the rise in prominence of environmental issues on the global agenda and the evolution of climate change within that context. Environmental issues, much less climate change, were not a major concern of the United Nations in the period following the Organization's creation. During its first 23 years, action on these issues was limited to operational activities, mainly through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and when attention was paid to them, it was within the context of one of the major preoccupations of that time: the adequacy of known natural resources to provide for the economic development of a large number of UN members or the "underdeveloped countries", as they were then termed.
In 1949, the UN Scientific Conference on the conservation and utilization of resources (Lake Success, New York, 17 August to 6 September) was the first UN body to address the depletion of those resources and their use. The focus, however, was mainly on how to manage them for economic and social development, and not from a conservation perspective. It was not until 1968 that environmental issues received serious attention by any major... |
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