Until 1992, few Brazilians knew what an NGO was. The acronym for non-governmental organization entered the national vocabulary once and for all because of Rio-92, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development that took over the Riocentro convention center, in Rio de Janeiro, 30 years ago, between 3 and June 14, 1992.
At the summit, while representatives from more than 170 countries discussed a new development model, less predatory for nature, NGOs lent a different color to the event, in a parallel meeting at Aterro do Flamengo with an air of environmentalist Woodstock.
Rio-92, or Eco-92, as it was also known, presented the environmental agenda to Brazilians and created a kind of breeding ground for civil society movements for the preservation of the environment, which were dispersed before, to show their face.
“The country that hosted the Eco-92 was the one that had the largest tropical forest in the world, which had come from three decades of destruction caused by predatory logging, expansion of the agricultural and mineral frontier and the opening of major roads”, recalls Paulo Adário , 73, one of the founders of Greenpeace Brazil and currently the NGO’s senior forest strategist.
Founded in 1971 in Vancouver, Canada, by a group of 12 people including hippies, ecologists and journalists, Greenpeace arrived in Brazil in April 1992, a few months before Rio-92. He carried in his luggage a strong anti-nuclear agenda, which reverberated here against the construction of the nuclear power plant complex in Angra dos Reis (RJ).
The NGO’s first protest in Brazil was to occupy the courtyard of the nuclear plant, where activists put up a banner with the words “Nuclear Não”.
Adário says that, at the time, Greenpeace’s international agenda, in addition to the nuclear issue, included the protection of whales, the target of Japanese and Norwegian whaling ships, the fight against pesticides and the conservation of forests, which would gain more prominence as the that the climate change agenda came into action — also as a result of Rio-92, which launched the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Thus, the Amazon and indigenous peoples became central guidelines for Greenpeace’s activities in Brazil, which they continue to this day.
The Amazon was also the cause that brought the NGO TNC (The Nature Conservancy) to the country. She started working with projects in the Brazilian Amazon in 1988, shortly before Rio-92. The organization, created in the 1950s to encourage the creation of national parks and protected areas in the US, expanded to South America for this purpose and today operates in more than 70 countries.
In Brazil, it focuses on projects in the Amazon, Cerrado and Atlantic Forest, and embraces other themes, such as forest restoration, sustainable agriculture, infrastructure, food security and water resources.
Karen Oliveira, director for public policy and government relations at TNC, was 20 years old and was a geology student at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) when she participated in the NGO meeting in Rio-92, at Aterro do Flamengo.
For her, the conference was the most important of the UN’s post-war meetings and a milestone for taking the environmental issue out of a niche. “From then on, we stopped talking about the environment as something distant, with no direct relationship with people’s daily lives, to put the issue at the center of development, economy, society and culture”, says Karen.
Another legacy of Rio-92, according to her, was the creation of conventions to address climate change, forests and biodiversity, which resulted in international commitments. “If today we have a Paris Agreement, a carbon market and rules for protecting biodiversity, the seed was planted there.”
Discussions on the new model of economic development had begun 20 years earlier, at the Stockholm conference in Sweden. The event in 1972 discussed for the first time, on a global scale, the impact of human activity on the planet. But, at the time, Brazil had defended the “right to pollute” in order to develop.
Rio-92 signaled a review of the country’s position and also encouraged a change in the attitude of companies, which felt the effect of demanding compliance with environmental legislation, built in the 1980s and reinforced in the 1988 Constitution.
“In Rio-92, NGOs were considered the stars and companies, villains. But there was, for the first time, the recognition that a change of attitude was necessary, of working together”, says Marina Grossi, president of CEBDS (Brazilian Business Council for Sustainable Development).
Formed by 93 large companies, including national and multinational, the CEBDS was created five years after the conference, in the spirit that companies should move from “compliance” (strict compliance with the laws) to an agenda of solutions for social issues, climate and biodiversity, explains Marina.
It was also in 1992 that IPÊ (Instituto de Pesquisas Ecológicas) was born in Pontal do Paranapanema, in the extreme west of São Paulo.
There, the institute started its first research project to save an endemic species, the black lion tamarin, from extinction in the late 1980s, and expanded activities for sustainable development in the region — it was the first NGO to work with the MST (Landless Rural Workers Movement) in reforestation, environmental education and income generation projects.
“At Rio-92, there was a vibrant feeling that changing the world was possible. And it was: we were planting trees with the MST and showing that social issues were linked to the value of nature”, says Suzana Pádua, founder of IPÊ.
The partnership between NGOs, MST and large landowners continues to this day and has allowed the recovery, according to IPÊ, of 1,200 hectares of native forest with the planting of 2.4 million trees.
