MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 30 of 100

Correct — option (3). The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, universally known as Rio+20, produced an outcome document titled The Future We Want, and one of its substantial sections is devoted to the green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication. That section is exactly what option (3) describes. It does not create a binding rule and it does not define a single model that every country must adopt; what it does is set out the conditions and safeguards under which green economy policies should be pursued — that they respect national sovereignty and each country's own circumstances and priorities, that they should not be used as a disguised restriction on international trade or as a means of arbitrary discrimination, that they should not impose unjustified conditions on official development assistance, and that they should contribute to poverty eradication, decent work and the sustainable management of natural resources rather than being pursued for their own sake. Guidelines is therefore the right word for what was adopted, and it is worth being precise about why: green economy was the most contested item on the agenda at Rio, with developed countries pressing for it as the organising idea of the conference and many developing countries fearing it would become a new basis for trade barriers and aid conditions, so what emerged was a negotiated framework of principles rather than a prescription. Rio+20 was held from the twentieth to the twenty-second of June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, twenty years after the Earth Summit of 1992 in the same city, and it is easiest to remember through its four principal outcomes. It agreed the green economy guidelines just described. It launched the intergovernmental process that produced the Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted three years later in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda. It reformed the institutional architecture, replacing the Commission on Sustainable Development with a High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development and agreeing to strengthen and upgrade the United Nations Environment Programme, including by giving its governing body universal membership. And it adopted a ten-year framework of programmes on sustainable consumption and production. Each of the three wrong options in this question is a distortion of one of those facts — the date, the goals and the treatment of UNEP — which makes the question a compact test of whether the conference has been read or merely heard of. Option (3) is the answer.

• (1)The conference was held in June 2014 in Brazil. — This statement gets the month and the country right and the year wrong, which is what makes it the most dangerous of the three. Rio+20 was held in June 2012, not June 2014, and the year is the whole point of the conference: the name Rio+20 means twenty years after the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, so the date is fixed by arithmetic and cannot be anything else. A candidate who reads Brazil and June and stops there will accept the statement, and that is precisely the reading habit this option is built to catch. The lesson generalises well beyond this question: where a statement contains several particulars, one of them false, the false particular is often the one a reader is least likely to check because the others have already created a sense of familiarity. Check the number, not the setting.
• (2)The conference laid out Millennium Development Goals for the world. — The Millennium Development Goals were not laid out at Rio+20. They came out of the Millennium Summit of September 2000 and the Millennium Declaration adopted there, took the form of eight goals with a target date of 2015, and were already in their final years by the time this conference met. What Rio+20 did was the opposite in time and different in kind: it launched the intergovernmental process that produced the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of seventeen goals adopted in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda, universal in application rather than directed chiefly at developing countries. The confusion the option exploits is the general one between the two generations of global goals, and the fix is to date them: the Millennium Development Goals run from 2000 to 2015, and the Sustainable Development Goals from 2016 to 2030, with Rio+20 in 2012 standing between them as the conference that began the second.
• (4)The member nations de-powered UN Environment Programme in this conference. — This statement reverses what actually happened. Far from de-powering the United Nations Environment Programme, Rio+20 agreed to strengthen and upgrade it, and the most concrete element of that decision was to give its governing body universal membership so that every member state of the United Nations, rather than a smaller elected group, would sit on it; the body was subsequently reconstituted as the United Nations Environment Assembly. Strengthening UNEP was part of the wider institutional reform at the conference, which also replaced the Commission on Sustainable Development with the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. A candidate may be drawn to this option by a general impression that global environmental governance is weak and that conferences achieve little, but an impression about outcomes is not a substitute for knowing what was decided, and the decision here ran in the opposite direction.

The sequence of global environment and development conferences is worth holding as a single line, because almost every question on the subject is really a question about where one conference sits in relation to the others. The Stockholm Conference of 1972 was the first United Nations conference on the human environment and led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme. The Rio Earth Summit of 1992 produced the Rio Declaration, Agenda 21 and the two conventions opened for signature there, on climate change and on biological diversity, and set up the Commission on Sustainable Development to follow up. The Johannesburg summit of 2002, sometimes called Rio+10, reviewed progress on Agenda 21. Rio+20, held in Rio de Janeiro from the twentieth to the twenty-second of June 2012, was the twentieth anniversary conference and produced the outcome document The Future We Want. Its achievements were of three kinds. On substance, it negotiated a framework of guidelines for green economy policies, framed as a tool for sustainable development and poverty eradication rather than as a rigid model, and hedged with safeguards against its use as a trade barrier or an aid condition. On goals, it launched the process that produced the Sustainable Development Goals — seventeen goals adopted in 2015 within the 2030 Agenda, replacing the eight Millennium Development Goals that had run from 2000 to 2015 and differing from them by applying to every country rather than mainly to developing ones. On institutions, it replaced the Commission on Sustainable Development with the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, agreed to strengthen and upgrade the United Nations Environment Programme with universal membership of its governing body, and adopted a ten-year framework of programmes on sustainable consumption and production. Holding those three headings is enough to answer almost anything an examiner can ask about the conference.

International environmental conferences are a fixed part of the MPSC syllabus and the Commission's method of setting them is consistent: take a conference the candidate has heard of and offer four statements of which three misstate a date, an outcome or an institution. This item is a clean specimen — one option shifts the year by two, one attributes the wrong generation of global goals, and one inverts the decision on UNEP — so a candidate who knows the conference by its three headings can eliminate all three quickly, while one who knows only the name is left choosing between plausible sentences. That asymmetry is why conference questions repay a short structured note more than extensive reading: for each conference, the year, the city, the outcome document, and two or three decisions. Note also the layout of this question, which recurs in this paper. The stem asks which of the following statements is or are correct, which sounds as though a statement list will follow, but no list is printed; the four numbered rows are themselves full-sentence options and exactly one is to be chosen. A candidate expecting a labelled list of statements can lose time looking for one. Where the numbered rows are complete sentences making rival factual claims, they are options, and the plural in the stem is a formula rather than an instruction.

• The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+20, was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from the twentieth to the twenty-second of June 2012, twenty years after the Rio Earth Summit of 1992; its outcome document is titled The Future We Want.
• The outcome document contains a substantial section on the green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, setting out guidelines and safeguards for green economy policies rather than a binding model, including that they must not become a disguised restriction on international trade or a condition on development assistance.
• Rio+20 launched the intergovernmental process that produced the Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015 within the 2030 Agenda; the Millennium Development Goals, by contrast, came from the Millennium Summit of September 2000 and ran to 2015.
• The conference strengthened rather than weakened the United Nations Environment Programme, agreeing to upgrade it and to give its governing body universal membership; that body was subsequently reconstituted as the United Nations Environment Assembly.
• Rio+20 replaced the Commission on Sustainable Development with the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development and adopted a ten-year framework of programmes on sustainable consumption and production.

• Accepting a statement because the place and the month are right while the year is wrong, which is the standard construction of a date distractor and the reason Rio+20 must be dated by its own name to 2012
• Confusing the Millennium Development Goals with the Sustainable Development Goals, or attributing either to the wrong conference, when the two sets are separated by fifteen years and by a difference in universality
• Assuming that international conferences weaken institutions, and so accepting a statement that UNEP was de-powered, when Rio+20 in fact agreed to strengthen it and to give its governing body universal membership
• Searching for a labelled statement list when the stem's plural formula suggests one, in a question where the four numbered rows are themselves the options and exactly one is to be chosen

Global conferences reach MPSC papers as date questions, outcome-document questions, and decision questions, and the harder items combine all three by offering four sentences each containing a different particular to be verified. Conventions and protocols are examined alongside them and should be prepared in the same table — the year, the parent convention, the subject and the mechanism — because an examiner will often set a conference and a convention against each other to see whether the candidate can keep them apart. Climate and biodiversity items dominate this part of the syllabus, but sustainable development conferences and the goal frameworks that came out of them appear regularly and are easier to score on, because their content is small and stable. When a question names a conference by an anniversary title such as Rio+20, the arithmetic in the name itself fixes the year and should be used as the first check on any option containing a date.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following was an institutional outcome of the Rio+20 conference held in 2012 ?

  • (a)The creation of the United Nations Environment Programme
  • (b)The replacement of the Commission on Sustainable Development by the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development
  • (c)The adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
  • (d)The establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

  Answer(b) The replacement of the Commission on Sustainable Development by the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. The other three belong to earlier moments in the same story and are worth dating precisely: UNEP followed the Stockholm Conference of 1972, the climate convention was opened for signature at the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up in 1988 by UNEP together with the World Meteorological Organization. Rio+20 also agreed to strengthen UNEP by giving its governing body universal membership.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In the outcome document of Rio+20, how was the concept of the green economy treated ?

  • (a)As a binding obligation on all states to adopt a single green economy model by 2020
  • (b)As a tool for sustainable development and poverty eradication, subject to guidelines and safeguards including that it must not become a disguised restriction on international trade
  • (c)As a concept rejected outright by the conference and removed from the final text
  • (d)As a fund created to compensate developing countries for the cost of environmental regulation

  Answer(b) As a tool for sustainable development and poverty eradication, subject to guidelines and safeguards including that it must not become a disguised restriction on international trade. Green economy was the most contested item at the conference: developed countries wanted it as the organising theme, while many developing countries feared it would become a basis for trade barriers and aid conditions. What emerged was a negotiated set of principles that respects national circumstances and priorities rather than prescribing a single model.