Global Environmental Sustainability: Chapter 2 - The United Nations' journey to global environmental sustainability since Stockholm: An assessment

This chapter seeks to clarify or extend the arguments elucidated in Chapter 1, Introduction: Sustainable Development—A Preliminary Reflection and to provide a detailed review and coherent picture of the United Nations’ environmental initiatives from a historical perspective. Particularly, it aims to explore comprehensively the evolution of the concept of sustainable development since the United Nations convened its first international conference on sustainable resource use in 1949. This serve as the basis for understanding the relationship between the economic, social, and environmental problems confronting us today. This chapter also discusses a number of major efforts made at various United Nations conventions such as the Stockholm Conference, the World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002) and the Rio+20 Summit (2012), among others, to reinforce the operational perspectives of the concept of sustainable development.