__/ Permanent Mission of Greece to the United Nations \_

The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (also known as Earth Summit), held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was the first meeting of world leaders to comprehensively address the interlinked global problems of environmental degradation and socio-economic underdevelopment. The Summit’s participating leaders endorsed the Rio Declaration and adopted Agenda 21, a comprehensive plan of action aiming at delivering the message of the urgent need for sustainable development, to the world, for the 21st century.

The efforts undertaken for the implementation of Agenda 21 paved the way towards gradual inclusion of the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development into governmental policy-planning and policy-making at the national, regional and international levels, while its follow-up contributed to the wide spread acceptance and adoption of an integrated, cross-sectoral and participatory approach to sustainable development.

Ten years later, in 2002, the leaders of the world gathered again, at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, to review Agenda 21 and “the Programme for the Further Implementation of Agenda 21”, that is, Agenda 21’s mid-term review, prepared by the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), a functional organ of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which bares the bulk of the work for sustainable development within the UN system. A number of certain concrete goals, in line with the existing ones, for the promotion of sustainable development had also found its place at the Millennium Declaration, adopted in 2000 by the Millennium Summit.

In Johannesburg, the international community acknowledged the continuous severity of existing socio-economic and environmental conditions and the constraints states, especially developing ones, faced in implementing Agenda 21 and decided to adopt the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPoI), which sought to expedite the realization of the objectives set by Agenda 21 and urge countries to achieve tangible results in specified time-bound targets and internationally agreed goals.

JPoI’s main aim is to promote integration of the three pillars of sustainable development -environment protection, economic growth and social welfare- and to further contribute to the realization of the overarching objectives of:

- protection and management of the natural resource base of economic and social development,

- change in unsustainable patterns of production and consumption and

- poverty eradication.

Furthermore, JPoI seeks to address certain cross-cutting issues of great relevance and significance to the sustainable development of developing countries, such as solid economic and financial base, good governance, capacity building and technology transfer, at both the domestic and international level, since these issues are essential for the success of JPoI’s ambitious plan.

The European Union has been very supportive of the promotion of issues pertaining to economic, social and ecologic sustainable development and very active in the implementation of relevant policies. In 2001, it adopted the European Union Sustainable Development Strategy, a long-term strategy for sustainable development, which contained a number of concrete proposals about the improvement of its policy making in order to become more coherent and focussed on the long term benefits of sustainable development, as well as specific headline objectives and the measures needed to achieve them. The EU Strategy for Sustainable Development serves as the basic guideline for achieving the targets and priorities the EU has set for the promotion of all aspects of sustainable development, at both the regional and the global level.

At its 11^th Session, that took place during the Hellenic Presidency of the European Union, the first EU Presidency after the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD, 2002), the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-11) decided that its multi-year programme of work beyond 2003 (2004-2017) would be organised on the basis of seven two-year cycles. Each cycle focuses on selected thematic clusters of issues as well as on important cross-cutting issues that were highlighted at WSSD and which are common for all thematic cycles. Each two-year thematic cycle consists of a Review Year for the assessment of progress towards meeting the internationally agreed targets of the Millennium Development Goals and the WSSD, and a Policy Year for political guidance towards implementation.

This bears testimony to the close relevance and inter-linkage of overarching global issues, such as poverty, with sectoral issues such as water, sanitation and human settlements. This also gave strong evidence on the need to intensify efforts, at all levels, to improve efficiency, effectiveness and integration of policies, especially domestic ones, consolidate partnerships, with emphasis on public-private schemes, enhance capacity building, promote means for additional and innovative financing and strengthen international cooperation as well as improve means and mechanisms for measuring and reviewing progress- made.

Over recent years, Greece has progressed towards sustainable development a fact reflected in its National Report to CSD 12. The Greek Government gives special emphasis on achieving the necessary technical know-how and constructional experience needed to incorporate sustainable development practices in all aspects of its social, economic and environmental policies and seeks to reconsider these issues within an innovative framework in the coming years.