There are too many people in the world. Politics as we know it in the West hasn't been brave enough to engage with this issue. We equate progress and development with creating more and more stuff, helping produce more and more people, finding ways to keep people alive etc. That's going to have to change.

As Peregrineman says, there are only so many people that this planet can support at a reasonable quality of life, and our numbers already exceed that. If Rio+20 doesn't recognise the simple fact that you can have unrestricted quantity of human lives or quality of all life, but not both, it's a total waste of time and energy.
From the article above, it's a total waste of time and energy.

This piece is woefully short on specifics. As far as I can tell, the biggest achievement is the development for a new way to hold meetings.

"Social, economic and environmental concerns." This will not end well.

For generations, the government has given money for having children. This still applies, despite the changing demographics. At least once a month, an article will appear on this site about the imminent extinction of a species, rhinos, tigers, koalas, turtles, tuna fish, gorillas, orangutans, and many many more.
Always the root of their problem is people, too many people. Yet we still pay people to breed, instead of paying them not to breed.
It is very clear that all these people are a problem, socially, economically and environmentally, yet we keep paying human beings to breed.
Those unlucky enough to be incapable of reproducing, may be financed to use new technologies that will allow them to procreate.
Ideological stupidity has created death sentences for most species not dependent on human interactions, as land is cleared for development, and habitats of precious creatures destroyed.
Some joining of dots is required as a matter of urgency, in so much as, if we wish to maintain the variety of life this planet sustains, then funding human breeding programs needs to stop forth with. Too many humans are not just deadly for other species, but for humans also, and in respecting the right of other beings to live, is the blueprint for us to live in a sustainable way..

There are too many people in the world.

Careful - you leave yourself open to the usual rejoinder of "there's enough for everybody even with double the number".

Of course there's enough if we all stand still, breath in unison and eat plankton. But seriously - let's start aggressively reducing the birth-rate and everything will become a lot less urgent. The Catholic church will just have to deal with the fact that we'd rather enjoy this world rather than the next one.

Oh yeah - I see now that all our problems are caused by the massive emphasis on environmental protection over the last 20 years at the expense of economic progress. Silly me - there was I thinking it was the other way round.

I am not encouraged by this article. Far from it. Indeed recent comments in the EU that we may have to rethink ‘our expensive values’ in the face of international competition only makes me more nervous.

One day in the future, a child will flick through a 3D app, amazed: beautiful creatures, cat-like, striped with orange and white, seas replete with magnificent cetaceans, skies illuminated by birds. Great landscapes fill the page, arboreal forests and endless golden plains.

“Of course”, the app will say, as soon as she finishes looking, “We could have saved all of this for you, but we chose instead to ravage it all in the name of economic development. Our wholesale destruction of all this beauty and wonder and magnificence, unique and precious in the vastness of our solar system, was slowly chipped away and destroyed, little by little, until nothing remained but a wasteland.

And we did it all for you.”

I don’t think our children will thank us for it.

Please cut the crap.

There is no such thing as 'sustainable development' (other than ripping up asphalt and installing permaculture gardens).

The world is run by money-lenders and corporations. And they will do whatever it takes to maintain their various Ponzi schemes ..... if only for a few more years = more ripping up of Canada to get to the tar sands, more blowing up of US mountains to get to the coal, more deepwater drilling, and opening up the Arctic and Antarctic to oil exploration (plus oil spills and runaway greenhouse emissions).

"Protecting the environment is not enough. We need to encourage public and private decision-makers to incorporate environmental and social concerns into economic planning and growth strategies. "

I was working for UNEP in 1992. Somehow, I seem to recall that we thought then that this was what the original Rio conference, Agenda 21 and the UN Commission on Sustainable Development were all about. Silly us.

It would be helpful to know who the author is; could this please be added to the title above the article? The piece reads like government spokesman waffle. Worse, like government spokesman waffle from 1992, to which has been added "plus 20" and a reference to the Internet.

It would be helpful to know who the author is; could this please be added to the title above the article? The piece reads like government spokesman waffle

He's the Brazilian foreign minister.

and many other public and private actors

No!

The last thing the world needs is more "activist" actors. Please learn a lesson from the Will.I.Am flying to a meeting about climate change in his helicopter.

Ah, that explains it. Thanks

It's really reassuring to read the above comments and see that I'm not in a minority with regard to the 'too many people' issue. I've commented on over population a few times on The Guardian, and my comments have often been deleted. As the world population soars, it will be interesting to see how we come to grips with over population. I tend towards a leftist politics, so I like coming here to see how The Guardian treats environmental issues. But the left also so often seems wedded to supporting the poor, needy, disposessed etc, and this so often means they miss the bigger picture with regard to the overall environment, ecosystem, Gaia etc. Nice to see that a few of us here are willing to engage with the controversial issue of over population. It is surely the big inconvenient truth out there, and a huge challenge for politics as we know it. many systems and forms of politics are designed for expansion only. That must have to change, unless the human race just hits the buffers of food production etc, in which case we're set for limitations from without.

This is pie in the sky waffle. It comes up with all manner of assertions about things that "must" be done -- none of them substantiated -- but only seems to look to one goal and one achievement.

The achievement is an extra layer of intricacy added to UN bureaucracy in forming "proposals that will be handed to the heads of state and government". It is particularly disingenuous for a member of a government to imply that any consideration will be given to such proposals, when he knows from personal experience how they will be ignored.

The goal is to add so many extra layers to environmental policy that the environmental part is pushed to the background and finally disappears. It would be wonderful if we would somehow convince all global governments to follow recommendations that carry no weight, and positively magical if the same policy could bring environmental sustainability, economic growth, and social reform. However, it's worrying that a government minister could even claim to believe such a fairyland.

The whole problem that a movement towards environmental sustainability has to face is that it's cheaper, easier, and quicker not to implement green development. Protecting the environment will add a cost to any activity, and the challenge is to convince stakeholders to act in a responsible manner, rather than to destroy the environment as much as they want for personal gain while spreading the disastrous consequences around the whole world population. Rightly speaking, a policy that has positive environmental consequences and also brings immediate benefit to the party implementing it is not an environmental policy, it's old fashioned cut-throat economics.

I'm amazed that it's even necessary to point this out, but the present disastrous degradation of natural resources can only be turned around by adding a condition to policy planning whereby environmental considerations are taken into account. To make economic and social benefit a precondition of green policymaking is to reject environmentalism completely, as a policy that brings social and economic benefit is going to get adopted anyway.

If this programme is to succeed, it must reject national interest in favour of global concerns; negative-sum-game actions designed to make one country draw ahead of others at the expense of global resources must cease. It's no surprise that nationalist government ministers are doing their best to torpedo this; Minister Patriota should come back when he's changed his job and his name.

There seems to be a general consensus BTL that there are too many people in the world today. Can I ask if they've decided yet the order in which they take the cyanide or is overpopulation everybody else?

So Rio+20's great achievement was to give activists a louder voice. And they used this to say that the world should give them more money to help them to destroy its economies.

It's magic!

This must be the 10th article in 10 days on Rio that sounds exactly the same.

From now on, a three-dimensional approach to development is crucial, one that combines social, economic and environmental concerns.

Right, you failed on the environmental goals, so lets add two more goals.

Environment (weather and such things), ecology (the other species sharing the planet), economy (the only human invented 'thing'). Those are my 3 E's. Conflating environment with ecology isn't a way forward (even though the two are closely inter-related - and our economy is entwined in both). Environment and ecology can exist without economics; I don't think the reverse is true.

There again, politicians find it hard to to understand that you have to target multiple problems, or even that there could be more than one simple problem. The costs of doing so don't go down well with their pals, though.

I'd say our politicians are a total waste of time and energy. I raised things to my local MP regarding RIO+20 but nothing came of it. Who do they serve?