Two decades ago, at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, more than a hundred heads of state and government joined international officials and representatives of numerous nongovernmental organizations in the biggest conference ever organized to discuss two fundamental issues for humankind – economic development and the environment on which that development depends.
Dubbed the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the Rio summit set in motion the global environmental and sustainable development agendas that have guided international efforts ever since.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF) was founded in the preparatory efforts for the 1992 Earth Summit and has become the financial mechanism for important international environmental conventions, including the Rio'92 "twins" – the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD).
Today the GEF constitutes the single multilateral organization serving as the financial mechanism to multiple U.N. Conventions. GEF brings to Rio+20 its key message about the need to promote synergies between environmental conventions within the different environmental focal areas – biodiversity, climate change, international waters, land degradation, ozone depletion substances and persistent organic pollutants.
During Rio+20, the GEF launched "From Rio to Rio" a book about its 20 years of activity. The GEF's many contributions since those first days at Rio are considered through twenty selected projects that illustrate GEF's mission to assist in the protection of the global environment and to promote environmentally sustainable development. The selected projects include grant programs representing all the GEF focal areas.
Access to financial resources is a fundamental prerogative for the engagement of developing countries and countries in transition in the implementation and execution of environmental projects. Therefore, the GEF is already pushing for increased financial access. In the zero draft of the Rio+20 outcome document, regarding the financing structure of environmental projects, member states call for the GEF to be strengthened, with regularity in funding flows and reform of governance processes towards more transparent and democratic systems.
During Rio+20 the GEF delegation participated in a number of events and prepared a report on lessons learned from climate change and biodiversity projects that analyzes successes and failures in the provision of grants and the production of national reports.