By DON DE SILVA

The month before the London 2012 Olympics, another event will take place which will deal with more urgent issues, concerning the present and the future of the Earth. Unfortunately, this event has been by-passed by the information super highway.

The UN Conference on Sustainable Development, called Rio+20, will be held in Rio de Janeiro from 20 to 22 June. The conference aims to assess the implementation of the resolutions of the Earth Summit of 1992.

The Cinderella treatment given by most governments and the media to the preparations for Rio+20 give pause for concern. The banking and economic crisis has sapped the will to act on environmental issues. Governments have by and large, failed to deliver the commitments made at the 1992 Earth Summit.

Rio+20 does not promise to be a challenging event as the first Earth Summit was. It is presidential election year in the US. It is unlikely that the event will be attended by many Heads of State. The political fiascos of the Copenhagen Climate Conference are still raw in the minds of environmental decision-makers.

However, there is clear scientific evidence that time is running out in our ability to wisely use the Earth’s natural resources and biodiversity, upon which our livelihood depends. This scenario challenges all of us to rise above our differences and narrow concerns and respond to the reality that the future of human life on Earth depends on what we do, or fail to do.

Throughout the world, conflict over scare resources is escalating rapidly. Rio+20 as a unique opportunity to make the fundamental transformational change in the way we think and live. This will require a degree of common action, beyond anything we have yet experienced or imagined.

The decisions and policies, which determine our impacts on sustainability, are mainly motivated by economic and financial considerations. The environmental challenges at Rio + 20 will have to be rooted in our deepest moral and ethical values.

The United Nations cannot do it alone. Nor can the plethora of environmental non-governmental organisations dotted across the world. The environmental movement requires a seismic mind-shift. The same old, same old approaches of strategies, actions plans, projects and programmes have not fully worked. The movement is bogged down in a mire of bureaucracy. It has to re-discover the sparks of commitment that led to the globalisation of the environmental movement.

We must realise that the environment depends on the “in-vironment”, the inner values, which determine the way humankind uses the fragile resources of this planet.

If Rio+20 is to have any impact, spiritual and faith-based organisation will have get into the act. They will have to work together and lead in facilitating changes in life-styles and human behaviour to put the world on a path to sustainable living.

The time for such organisations and movements has come. They will have to take on the root causes of the environmental and climate change crises. These are the same as those of the economic and financial crises, the inadequacies of our economic system and the profligate values, which govern the system.