A step forward or backward at Rio?

This week people are streaming into Rio de Janeiro for the year's biggest international event the UN Conference on Sustainable Development to be held on Wednesday and Thursday.

It is more popularly known as the Rio+20 Summit, to commemorate the landmark Earth Summit of 1992, which brought the environmental crisis into the mainstream of political life.

Rio+20 is meant to reaffirm the political commitments made then and to come up with new action plans to counter the crises which have become much more serious than 20 years ago. But the developed countries now appear reluctant to make a simple reaffirmation of the original Rio equity principle, or to re-commit to provide finance and technology transfer.