GEF

Unit 6  |  Social Changes of Sustainable Development 127 One of the first international meetings focusing on sustain- able development was the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. Despite ambitious goals, little progress was made. Twenty years later in 2012, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development met in Rio to try again. Called Rio+20, the conference provided the govern- ments in attendance with the opportunity to work together to set goals and map a plan for implementing sustainable devel- opment around the globe. Still, global poverty is evidence that sustainable development is not yet well-established. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 47 percent of the population lives on less than one dollar per day, and the percentage of people living in poverty has increased over the past twenty-five years. Fortunately, there are some positive signs. Globally, from 1981 to 2013 the number of people living on less than $1.90 per day dropped from 1.9 to .99 billion, which means the proportion of the world’s population living below the official poverty line declined from 42 percent to 10 percent. Global health and climate change are dynamically linked. While overall global poverty is decreasing, economic inequal- ity has grown rapidly. The 2016 United Nations Human Development Report states that “absolute inequality...has increased dramatically since the mid-1970s.” At present, the ?  DID YOU KNOW Linking environmental and economic health, the United Nations highlights climate change as the defining sustainable development challenge of the twenty-first century. Present genera- tions benefit from the current energy economy, while efforts to reduce greenhouse gases will primarily benefit future generations. Climate change demonstrates how sustain- ability forces us to look at social equity in new ways.