RIO+20

This workshop is exactly in line with what we had declared we would be doing to bring Rio home: we keep up the momentum for further promoting sustainable development, we want European civil society to be involved and we want to contribute with concrete proposals.

In February last year, Mrs Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, talking about EU-Brazil relations said that this is a relationship that is important, but she didn’t think that the EU had made it as important as it ought to be. We support the need to go deeper in our relations with Brazil. And here’s the evidence: we are again meeting today, keeping up the regular pace of our exchanges, willing to produce joint work that will be useful also to our political leaders.
So we will send the result of this Round Table to Mrs Ashton, and to the Brazilian authorities, as we always do, in order to provide a civil society contribution to her important work. And we are doing it right in time for the next EU-Brazil Summit that will take place in Brasília in two days from now.

The EESC has been very actively involved in the run-up to Rio, enhancing civil society dialogue in preparation of the Conference and at the Conference.
We were committed to contributing to the EU's position and to mobilising EU civil society in order to push EU and world leaders towards an ambitious outcome.
We know now that the outcome text has not been as ambitious as we Europeans would have wished it to be. Now we have to work to make the agreement a success by advancing further on the processes that were launched and by implementing at least here in Europe the proposals that we have put forward in New York and in Rio de Janeiro.