Occupy Rio +20 have created a petition that you can sign.

It basically calls on the upcoming Earth Summit, twenty years on from Rio in 1992, “to vastly scale up political, financial & public response to the environmental, social & economic crisis of our time, & to raise ambition to the level that science demands… Governments, corporations and financial institutions must wake up and dramatically prioritise people & the planet over abusive exploitation for short-term profit & “growth”.

The Durban climate justice website outlines some backgroundto the Occupy Rio +20 petition.

This video (a promo for an Alternative Conference for the Rio Summit, to be held on 16th/17th June in central London) lists the ways in which the 1992 Rio Earth Summit has failed, so clearly we need Rio +20 to decide on a more effective set of approaches to reducing and adapting to climate change.  One that puts people and planet first, not profit and financial speculation on carbon prices  and natural resources.

Here is the Rio + 20 Position Paper of La Via Campesina, the international peasant movement. It denounces “The great deceit of 1992… “sustainable development”, which social organizations initially saw as a possibility to confront the root of the problems. However, it was nothing more than a cover-up for the search for new forms of accumulation. Today they look to legitimize a new façade under the name “green economy”.

La Via Campesina’s Position Paper is clear that all the talk of “green economy” is in fact more of the same old same old. “Governments, business people, and the organizations of the United Nations have spent these last years constructing the myth of the “green economy” and of the “greening of technology”. They present it as a new possibility to bring together environmental stewardship and business, but it is in fact the vehicle to obtain new advances of capitalism, putting the entire planet under the control of big capital.”

This video explains how the “green economy”agenda that the rich countries seem to be shaping up for Rio +20 is part of corporate colonialism, that grabs land, dispossesses small farmers and undermines food sovereignty.