SIDE EVENT
Friday 3 June
09:00-10:15 CEST
Stockholmsmässan, Room 3
Organizers: Stakeholderforum, FoRUM Norway
About: The two organising partners organised a series of webinars on the legacy of Stockholm 1972 (www.towardstockholm50.org)
Webinar 1: Strengthening Environmental Governance and Law – Speakers: Stephen Stec Senior Research Fellow on Environment and Democracy, Central European University Democracy Institute (Hungary), and Leida Rijnhout, Senior Advisor, Governance, Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future
Webinar 2: Environmental Diplomacy and Multilateralism – Speaker: Maria Ivanova, Associate Professor, Center for Governance and Sustainability, University of Massachusetts Boston
Webinar 3: Environmental Rights, Human Rights and Environmental Justice – Speaker: Professor Daniel Magraw, Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies
Webinar 4: Connecting the Dots – Making a Forceful Canon of the Rio Conventions and the Multilateral Environmental Agreements – Speaker: John E. Scanlon AM, former Secretary-General of CITES
Webinar 5: The Environment and Education Looking to the Future – Speakers: Professor Daniella Tilbury, Commissioner for Sustainable Development and Future Generations, Gibraltar; Arjen E.J. Wals, Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability, Wageningen UR and UNESCO Chair Social Learning for Sustainability; Thomas Macintyre, a research fellow and consultant on UNESCO projects and project leader at the Colombian Foundation Mentes en Transicio.
Webinar 6: Civil Society, the Environment and UNEP – Speaker: Professor Javier Surasky, Program Officer Governance, and Financing for Sustainable Development, Cepei
Webinar 7: Science and the Environment, Speaker TBC, Gothenburg Centre for Sustainable Development, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
During all the webinars the speakers will be asked to draft recommendation for the future. This outcome together with the results from the regional meetings and leadership dialogues will presented as the Peoples Environmental Narrative (PEN). This draft document will be consulted and commented mid-May with hundreds of CSOs to develop a final document. This PEN will be presented and discussed with audience and speakers during this side event.
Moderator(s): Jan-Gustav Strandenaes (Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future)
Panelists:
- Leida Rijnhout (Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future)
- Daniel Magraw (Centre for Environmental Law)
- Maria Ivanova (University of Massachusetts)
- Stephen Stec (Central European University)
- Daniella Tilbury (University of Cambridge)
- John Scanlon (Environmental)
Contact person: Leida Rijnhout (leida.rijnhout_at_stakeholderforum.org)
Event outcomes (Key transformative actions):
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Seven legacy issues which formed environmental policy, work and UNEP were identified. These will be presented, September 2022, in a report titled the People’s Environment Narrative. The themes are: Civil society and UNEP; Environmental diplomacy, the need for multilateralism; Science and environment; Environmental rights, human rights and environmental justice; The environment, education and the future; Connecting the dots, making a forceful canon of the Rio Conventions and the MEAs; Strengthening environmental governance and law.
The report contains 20 pages of recommendations. The strongest were: strengthening UNEP; integrating and implementing the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment as a human right, recognised by the Human Rights Council; protecting and expanding the safe inclusion and participation of civil society without being subjected to political censorship; implementing and strengthening environmental law and the MEAs; include ECOCIDE in environmental law; strengthening with resources and safeguarding the independence of science for the environment. -
We will focus on strengthening the environmental dimension of science and research and strive to have science research of the environment as an independent and fact finding process. We will also focus on strengthening the role of civil society and the major groups within UNEP and their role in decision making processes as well as in implementing the MTS and work programmes. Civil society and the major groups are essential in legitimising the work of UNEP, and their participation must never be subject to random or careless censorship by governments.
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We will work to strengthen multistakeholder processes with the goal of focussing on environmental justice and human rights, within the field of environmental governance and law and work to establish a process of reporting on decisions made by UNEP which is modelled on the UPR system from the Human Rights Council. We see it as essential to develop a follow-op programme after UNEP@50 and Stockhplm+50 to make sure these two commemorative events will not be relegated to history as on-off events,