UN conferences - how often they happen (response to Encieh question) --- Dear Encieh, I am late in responding to your question, but, in my role as a staff member of the UN, I need to clarify some points, in particular: 1) The 1972 Conference on the Human Environment (the Stockholm Conference) is not a recurring event. It was, indeed, a landmark event, because, as noted in the class article, "it was for the first time that the relationship between environmental, social and economic issues was discussed on a global level". That conference inspired all other UN conferences on sustainable development that were held after it, especially those generated by the Rio-92 Conference. It also established the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the first UN agency only dedicated to environmental issues. 2) The creation of UNEP, at that time, minimized the need to convene big international UN conferences, as the ones we see now, because UNEP was assigned the lead role by the UN as regards the negotiations on environmental issues, which culminated with the adoption, and then the ratification by all UN Member States, of the Montreal Protocol in 1987 - to date the only UN treaty ratified by all the 197 UN Member States. 3) nowadays, there are even too many UN conferences and too many UN agencies. While most of them are necessary, certainly it is also necessary for the UN to better streamline its work and its structure, especially to avoid "internal system competition" between UN agencies disputing the same sources of international funding (GCF, GEF etc., to name just a few).

Source author: Massimiliano Lombardo m.lombardo@unesco.org