50 years ago, the effects of climate change were a rarely discussed topic. Even the words such as environment and sustainable development were rarely uttered in the negotiation assemblies of the United Nations. This changed after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972.
The decade leading up to the conference had witnessed rapid biodegradation of the physical environment. Air Pollution that led to the “pea soup” fog had killed 750 people in London in 1962. A coal mine waste pile collapsed in Wales in 1967 killing 116 children and 28 adults. Methyl Mercury pollution in Japan’s city of Minamata affected 2,265 people and eventually killed them. Drought had ravaged the Sahel region of Africa. There were many other such instances.
In 1967, Sweden proposed a UN Conference on Human Environment. According to political scientist Prof Pamela Chasek, Sweden wanted “a serious and substantive discussion at the global level environmental problems.” In 1968, the UN General Assembly agreed to organise such a conference in the year 1972. In 1969, the UN decided that Sweden’s capital Stockholm, would be the venue.
The Stockholm Conference took place from June 5 to 16, 1972. 113 UN member states attended it. While the communist Eastern Block led by Russia participated in the preparatory meetings for the conference, it boycotted the actual event because East Germany was not allowed to participate, whereas West Germany was. Nevertheless, for the first time in the history of the United Nations, environmental concerns took centre stage beyond politics and economics.
The Stockholm Conference will be remembered for many firsts. It became the first UN conference which had the word environment in its title. For the first time, the best scientific minds of the world came together to prepare the Framework for the Conference, which became the first state of the environment report. The title of this report “Only One Earth” became the motto of not just the conference but many subsequent environmental struggles. For the first time, civil society participation was actively encouraged in a UN event. It was also here for the first time that developing countries asserted that they had the right to grow and develop, while developed countries were blamed for the pollution and environmental degradation that the world was witnessing.
India in this conference also became the champion for the developing world. Former Prime Minister of India, the late Indira Gandhi was the only foreign head of state to attend the conference.
Today the world is facing its biggest existential crisis in the form of climate change. The planet’s physical environment is far worse than what it was in 1972. So what did the Stockholm conference achieve?
The founding principles of environmental justice, which are the cornerstones of environmental laws and negotiations were decided here. This came out through the conference outcome, also called the Stockholm Declaration. Intergenerational obligations; the concept of sustainable development; the rights of the developing countries to future development; the concept of additional aid for the environmental concerns; and also the actions of one country should not become the environmental problems for another.
This 1972 conference also led to the first global treaty on Marine pollution called the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships or MARPOL. It was signed in 1973. A 10-year moratorium on whaling was announced. The 1972 conference also inspired countries to sign on to environmental conventions that were outside it’s purview. These include the World Heritage Convention, Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora or CITES, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.
The Stockholm Conference became the model for all UN conferences on the environment. The roots of advance negotiations, the creation of scientific reports and action plans are all to be found here. The conference’s greatest achievement was to ensure that the UN would continue to engage with the planet’s physical environment. This was done by setting up the United Nations Environmental Programme more popularly known as UNEP. UNEP which is headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya became the first and only UN agency to be hosted in a developing country.

Down to Earth is Science and Environment fortnightly published by the Society for Environmental Communication, New Delhi. We publish news and analysis on issues that deal with sustainable development, which we scan through the eyes of science and environment.

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