Sustainable Tourism Law

616 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW This conference was the first global coordinated action to find solutions for the growing environmental problems and establish lines of action. Its focus was precisely the international cooperation regarding environmental issues. Some of the most important international leaders attended the conference, such as Indira Gandhi, who emphasized the relationship between poverty and environmental damage, paving the way for more than thirty years of discussion about the topic. During the Cold War, China 1 , which had recently become a member of the United Nations, participated in the conference, unlike the Soviet Union countries. However, the involvement of the Soviet Union in the preparation of the conference mitigated the effects of its absence. There was a conflict between those who considered that development inevitably affects the environmental resources and those who defended that the environment should be safeguarded by any means necessary. Other countries, especially Brazil and Algeria, had considerable misgivings about the conference, as they considered it a way to divert attention from the real needs of the less developed countries. The Conference led to the establishment of environment ministries in more than one hundred countries as well as non-governmental organizations dedicated to the environmental cause 2 . As expected, the effects were not immediate since there wasn’t a real consciousness about the actual environmental damage. The Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment, rectius Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, with an initial proclamation and twenty-six principles, played an essential role in the development of International Environmental Law. In the 1960’s, there were just a few international conventions, whereas nowadays more than two hundred have taken place. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) was established in Nairobi, in 1972, as an instrument to promote the results of the Stockholm Conference, in order to preserve the environment and use our natural resources efficiently aiming to achieve a sustainable development. 1 Some questions about the inclusion of the populational issue were raised. All the deliberations were taken by consensus, a tradition that was kept in the following conference. 2 An estimated 100.000 organizations have been created in twenty years.