Which of the following statement/s is/are not correct ?
(a) UN conference on Environment and Development was held at Montreal in 1992.
(b) Bruntland Report, 1987 was related with UN second conference

Question

Which of the following statement/s is/are not correct ?
(a) UN conference on Environment and Development was held at Montreal in 1992.
(b) Bruntland Report, 1987 was related with UN second conference at Nairobi.
(c) The aim of the Kyoto Protocol was to address the problems of anthropogenic climate change.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), 'Statements (a) and (b)'. Read the instruction first: the question asks which statements are NOT correct, so every judgement must be inverted before the option is picked, and this is where most of the marks on this question are lost. Statement (a) places the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development of 1992 at Montreal. The year is right and the conference is right, but the city is wrong: UNCED, universally known as the Earth Summit, was held at Rio de Janeiro in Brazil from 3 to 14 June 1992, and it produced the Rio Declaration with its 27 principles, Agenda 21 and the Forest Principles, while the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity were opened for signature there. Montreal belongs to a different instrument altogether — the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances, adopted in 1987 — and the confusion between the two is exactly what the statement is built on. Statement (a) is therefore not correct. Statement (b) links the Brundtland Report of 1987 to a United Nations second conference at Nairobi. The report, properly titled Our Common Future, is the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, an independent commission created by the United Nations General Assembly in 1983 and chaired by the Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. It was submitted in 1987 and is remembered for the definition of sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It was not the output of any conference at Nairobi; the Nairobi meeting of 1982 was the ten-year review of the Stockholm Conference of 1972 and produced the Nairobi Declaration. Statement (b) is therefore not correct either. Statement (c) says the Kyoto Protocol aimed to address anthropogenic climate change, which is an accurate statement of its purpose: adopted in 1997 under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, it imposed binding emission-reduction commitments on developed, Annex I, countries. Statement (c) is correct, and so it is not part of the answer. Two statements fail — (a) and (b) — which is option (3).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Catches the Montreal-for-Rio error but lets statement (b) pass. The Brundtland Report was produced by the World Commission on Environment and Development, an independent commission set up by the General Assembly in 1983 and chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland; it was not the outcome document of a conference at Nairobi. A candidate who has memorised the year 1987 and the word 'Brundtland' without knowing which body produced the report will find statement (b) unobjectionable and stop one statement short of the answer.  (b) Catches the Brundtland error but accepts Montreal as the venue of the 1992 Earth Summit. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development met at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992; Montreal is associated with the 1987 Protocol on ozone-depleting substances, a wholly different instrument in a different decade on a different problem. Confusing the two is a very common substitution, and a candidate who makes it here throws away a mark that turns on nothing more than a city name.  (d) Requires statement (c) to be wrong as well, which it is not. The Kyoto Protocol, adopted at Kyoto in 1997 under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and in force from 2005, was directed squarely at human-induced climate change: it set quantified emission limitation and reduction commitments for developed countries and created the Clean Development Mechanism, Joint Implementation and emissions trading to help meet them. A candidate reaching for the all-inclusive option here has almost certainly lost track of the negative framing and is marking the statements that are correct.

Concept: The international environmental agenda is best held as a single dated sequence, because almost every question on it is a test of whether a candidate can attach the right event to the right year and place. The sequence runs: Stockholm 1972, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, the first of its kind, which produced the Stockholm Declaration, led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme with its headquarters at Nairobi, and gave 5 June as World Environment Day. Nairobi 1982, the ten-year review of Stockholm, which produced the Nairobi Declaration. The World Commission on Environment and Development, created by the General Assembly in 1983 and chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, reporting in 1987 as Our Common Future and putting sustainable development into general political vocabulary. Rio de Janeiro 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development or Earth Summit, which produced the Rio Declaration, Agenda 21 and the Forest Principles and opened the climate and biodiversity conventions for signature. Kyoto 1997, the Protocol under the climate convention. Johannesburg 2002, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, and Rio again in 2012 for Rio+20. Learn it as a line, not as isolated facts, and misplacements like the two in this question become visible immediately.

State PCS 2026 Q33 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q33 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer