Left to right: Westminster panellists Lloyd Timberlake, Lars-Erik Liljelund, Meg Hillier MP, Mark Edwards, Caroline Spelman MP and mediator Barry Sheerman MP
On 5th September 2011, Carbon Connect and Hard Rain Project hosted a meeting of ambassadors, British MPs and others in the House of Commons to discuss the sustainability “solutions” which Hard Rain Project will present at the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June 2012, a meeting 20 years after the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and 40 years after the Stockholm conference that put sustainability on the map. The meeting described the global progress of the Hard Rain movement and its future plans.
And there was an ulterior motive.
The 1992 Earth Summit brought together more heads of state and heads of government than any other meeting before or since. Ten years later, the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development was largely a failure, generating unenthusiastic speeches and virtually no action. Governments seem to have realized how difficult it is to lead voters along paths of sustainable human progress, and politicians how hard it is to get elected by promising such progress. So there is little enthusiasm among governments for the Rio summit next year. This is a tragedy, because real, scalable solutions are emerging. And they are being put in place.
So another motive for our 5th September meeting was to stir enthusiasm among the diplomatic corps for the summit, for sustainable development, and for the solutions being put in place in their own countries.
From new technologies and development projects through to lifestyle approaches, the display for Rio will present successful and practical solutions from over 25 countries that can be scaled up and widely adopted to help create a more sustainable future. The solutions are selected and presented by Lloyd Timberlake, an internationally acclaimed advisor to governments and business leaders and chief advisor to Hard Rain Project.
