Local Agenda 21 into Local Action 21

Summary

Over ten years on from the United Nations Environment and Development at Rio in 1992, a lot has been achieved to make our lives more sustainable. But there have been serious discontinuities between the actions taken at different levels, by different agencies and through different means.

If we are to develop into a sustainable society, the next ten years must go beyond agenda setting and unconnected pilot actions and must instead involve collective action towards goals around which a wide consensus has been generated, built on a solid foundation of research; this will require not only coordinated government action on regulations and taxes but also the active local participation of businesses and people in their everyday lives

The ‘Rio + 10’ conference in Johannesburg was a missed opportunity, but it may be that this consensus can be built within UK programmes and more widely under the umbrella of the European Union’s Sixth Action Programme on the Environment.