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Global Climate Change Digest
A Guide to Information on Greenhouse Gases and Ozone Depletion
Published July 1988 through June 1999

FROM VOLUME 4, NUMBER 12, DECEMBER 1991

NEWS...
EARTH SUMMIT PREPARATIONS

Item #d91dec66

Participants at a late October 1991 meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agreed that control of greenhouse gases should be the emphasis at the June 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). (Intl. Environ. Rptr., pp. 603-604, Nov. 6, 1991.)

The International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) organized a conference in Vienna in late November 1991 to provide interdisciplinary input to the preparations for UNCED. At the opening of An Agenda of Science for Environment and Development into the 21st Century, Bert Bolin, chairman of the IPCC, admonished politicians who are waiting for scientific certainty before taking action on climate change (New Scientist, p. 13, Nov. 30, 1991). The conference closed with a call for a new relationship between scientists and policy makers, and committed the ICSU to a review of science's relationship with U.N. agencies, industry, environmental groups and the media (ibid., p. 17, Dec. 7).

A dangerous polarization emerging between the nations of the rich North and those of the poor South in the negotiating sessions leading up to UNCED is the subject of an article in New Scientist, pp. 20-21, Nov. 23, 1991.