Sustainable Tourism Law

620 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW The Report recommends a proper management of the natural resources, saving energy and creating a balance with the population regarding the productive sectors and the potential of the ecosystems. It also recommended the increase of capital inflows and commerce in developing countries, as well as taking other decisions to reduce the inequalities in living standards between rich and emerging countries. The environmental protection must be integrated with the economic and social development. The agenda for the Rio Conference and the Johannesburg Summit that took place fifteen years later were defined this way. However, the new environmental sustainability concept was not used in a prominent way in the Rio Conference due to the positions argued by important developing countries at the time. Those countries, despite recognizing the importance of ecosystem limits, feared that those limits could negatively impact their development process. The ambiguity of “environment and development” allowed the creation of claims stating that the industrialized countries should mainly take measures against environmental destruction. I.1.3. Rio Conference The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) 8 in Rio de Janeiro, on June 1992, also known as the Earth Summit or Eco-92 was a crucial step for the implementation of the sustainable environment concept. From that moment on it became more prominent in the world’s political agenda and was gradually integrated with the political strategy of the countries . Given the circumstance of having Brazil as the host country, a radical change of attitude became evident, going from a reserved way of understanding sustainability – seeing it as a discussion that was only important to the rich nations – to an active defence of the multiple aspects in which it unfolds. On the other hand, the USA, a country that had assumed the leadership role twenty years earlier in Stockholm, had a very moderate reaction. At the end of the cold war, when hope was pervasive, the Rio Conference brought together approximately one hundred and twenty heads of state and government officials, as well as private entities such as businessmen and 8 Convened by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989.