|
At the 1st Ibero-American Congress for Sustainable Development, today, in Rio de Janeiro, the United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organization (UNESCO) announced the launching in Latin America and the Caribbean of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.
The UNESCO coordinator in Brazil in the area of Environment and Science, Celso Schenkel, informed that the Decade was launched by the United Nations (UN) on March 1, in New York, and is now reaching the Latin American and Caribbean region.
He recalls that the initiative assigns UNESCO responsibility for acting as a catalyst for the activities of various agencies that are part of the UN system, as well as governments, the business sector, and society as a whole.
Schenkel praised Brazil's government policies and environmental legislation, which he considers "very solid."
According to the specialist, the vast dimensions of the country lead to disparities in the way the environmental issue is treated.
"We hope that this operational capacity, not only of the State, but of the society, extends throughout the country, which is of immense proportions, especially the Amazon," he affirms.
The coordinator judges that the matter of global sustainability involves reconciling the appropriation of environmental assets in a "less prodigal" manner with the development of a better distribution of these benefits.
"You are depreciating the natural patrimony and concentrating more income, and this engenders a huge contradiction, since the country possesses a fantastic patrimony that is not distributed evenly among the population."
Nevertheless, in Schenkel's assessment, Brazil is very well positioned in the Latin American ranking of sustainable development, because government policies have made substantial progress and taken on the nature of a process.
"There exists a coherence in government policies, as much in the national system of conservation units as in the area of water management, which demonstrates that Brazilian society has incorporated them as important policies in the administration of the Brazilian State.
"The country has shown that it is capable of generating knowledge in this field and discharging the international commitments it assumed," he believes.
Agência Brasil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.