The United Nations: Working for global ecological stewardship

The speech about ‘The United Nations: Working for global ecological stewardship’ was given by Richard Shirres, who has a lot environmental and ecological work experiences. He talked about the scientific developments around us since the World War II, the emergence of global ecology principles and gave us an overview of sustainable development.

Creation of United Nations and the principles at early stage

  The establishing of United Nations (UN) in October 24^th1945 was aiming at maintaining the peace and national security, developing friendly relationships around nations and promoting international cooperation in economic and social. So, the main drive from 1945 was about rebuilding relationship between nations.

  The first resolution from UN in January London 1946 was about atomic weapons, and then, an important driving force in developing ecological stewardship of UN was originated from the funding of United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

  Therefore, environmental concerns are not an explicit figure when UN is created, and within only two decays there was increasing evidences that showing UN had become a global leading advocate for proposing global environmental concerns and delivering ecologically sustainable developments.

Early events that influencing UN’s global ecological stewardship

  Because UN is a large intergovernmental organization, it will need to make small scale actions and sometimes large concessions even at promoting global ecological advocacy.

 Here are the early significant events that influence UN’s global ecological stewardship:

• In 1956, the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) adopted the resolutions such as: pollution of high seas by radio-active material, International fishery conservation conventions.

• In 1964, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) established red lists for endangered species.

• In 1967, the Environmental Defense Fund (Environmental Advocacy charity) was funded in United States.

• In 1968, the UNESCO and IUCN organized the intergovernmental conference for rational use and conservation of biosphere.

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  Plenty of organizations and resolutions were funded and adopted by UN since WWII, and it is slowly but steadily trying to improve the global ecological stewardship.

Personal thoughts

  The speech gave us a basic overview of UN’s global ecological stewardship, it is quite interesting to see the story of United Nations and get to understand how UN play the crucial role in working to safeguard our biosphere and the long-term future of humanity.

  Although working for UN might not be an option for my future career, it is still worth to know how the global ecological stewardship works in UN and to learn the history of UN.

Recent video about UN launches Environmental Rights Initiative