Fifty years after the Stockholm Conference ushered in modern environmental diplomacy, we still face a triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution. Multilateralism is key to solving today’s global environmental challenges, but it may not be enough to avert catastrophic damage unless governments and all stakeholders rise to the occasion.

Fifty years ago, governments convened in Stockholm, Sweden, and formally acknowledged the link between the environment and development, placing it at the centre of the international agenda. Key ideas and institutions—such as “sustainable development” and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)—exist today because of the work sparked by the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment. The Stockholm Conference demonstrated that intergovernmental cooperation is possible.

Many environmental and sustainable development issues were laid out in the Stockholm Declaration and Action Plan. The Stockholm Conference took the first step to recognize these problems, raise awareness of the challenges that had to be addressed, and set the world on a path toward a more environmentally sustainable existence. Along this path, governments negotiated treaties, adopted action plans and programmes, collected environmental data, created scientific bodies, convened global conferences, and established environment ministries.

The environmental crisis points up the need to review our activities, not just in relation to the particular purpose and interest they are designed to serve, but in their overall impact on the whole system of interacting relationships, which determines the quality of human life.
Maurice Strong, Opening Statement, 1972 Stockholm Conference

Yet 50 years later, climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution are at levels that couldn’t have been foreseen in 1972. While the environment is no longer considered a “fringe” issue as it was in the 1960s and there is greater awareness of the human impact on the environment, progress has been uneven. The nature of human activities has not shifted sufficiently to reflect the limits of what our natural environment can sustain.

But the world actually has the tools it needs to confront the greatest environmental and development issues of the 21st century. And those tools had their start in Stockholm. This final brief in our series, “Still Only One Earth: Lessons from 50 years of UN sustainable development policy,” examines the legacies of Stockholm and the challenges that lie ahead.