World Environment Day 2012... and the host is Rio!

Ola galera,

Today is the eve of the World Environment Day (WED), an annual event which this year is celebrated in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil! Just a couple of weeks before the kick off of the Rio+20 UN conference on sustainable development, WED marks a lovely green celebration in host city Rio and around the world. The 'umbrella' theme for this year for both WED and Rio+20 is Green Economy. 'Green' is a truly in-word right now, and I do hope that it's not a phase, but we'll find a positive way to make it a real and lasting concept and practice.

I've been reading up on WED on the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) website (unep.org/wed), which has been really interesting to learn more about. Did you know that Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen is the UNEP Goodwill Embassador? I had no idea before I started looking into this. It seems Brazil really is the new host for so many events, with Rio+20 drawing near, the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. I hope they can handle it, haha..!

Apparently, the festivities for WED in Rio have already started - today, on the eve of the celebration, Gisele planted the first of the 50,000 trees which will be planted in Brazil, as she won the WED Challenge last year. 50,000 trees, how awesome is that! And Rio is already so lovely and green :) Perhaps next time I'm in Brazil, I will go have a look at the result by then.

Through the UNEP website I also found a cool website page launched to celebrate and follow the WED events and activities: greennationfest.com.br - although the homepage comes up in Portuguese. Good practice I guess ;)

Brazil and the environment have been in the spotlight recently - it seems Rio+20 and the decision on the new Amazon forest code have coincided somehow. As I've been reading these past couple of weeks on guardian.co.uk/environment (handy source!), Brazil's president Dilma Roussef has partially vetoed the new forest code (which would make (illegal) deforestation easier), but this 'partially' bit is causing some tumult indeed. Hmm, not such good news just weeks before Rio+20, but I have hope for the Amazon. It's not the end of the game yet - even if I'm just the ever positive thinker. We do need the Amazon forest to survive - our planet needs it, the Amazon is called its 'lungs' for a reason; just imagine all the natural beauty and riches it holds within it, many of which are probably still unknown to humankind. We could be missing out on so much! I saw a photo of the Amazon forest, the right half of which was deforested - it is so sad to look at.

Actually, I have to admit that before this year and the Rio+20 conference coming into the news, I didn't know that the last conference in Rio in 1992 had been such a breakthrough for environmental policy. Well, that's why it's called '+20' of course, to mark the 20 years that have passed since the first conference in Rio, so who else would host this conference but Rio again? So much has changed in those 20 years; sustainability and 'greening up' and taking better care of our planet have become truly significant concepts. For most of the 1990's I was still a child though, honestly I'm not even sure how to say 'sustainability' in its right context in Russian... I have become a lot more involved with the concept since fairly recently when I started my internship at Fairfood in Amsterdam. There's always a time and a place to learn ;)

In any case, as Rio celebrates World Environment Day and gets ready for the Rio+20 summit, the world's attention is directed to Brazil. Time for critical questions and solving the challenges we face starts... now!

Thanks for reading and come back soon! (So will I ;))

Um beijo