clipped from www.rhrealitycheck.org

Two landmark conferences of the 1990s really seemed to get the links between human population and the environment. The 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development noted that "human beings are the centre of concern for sustainable development." Building on this two years later, the Cairo Programme of Action included the objective "to reduce both unsustainable consumption and production patterns as well as negative impacts of demographic factors on the environment in order to meet the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

But in the following years, population started to fall off the map. In 2002, after several preparatory meetings for the Johannesburg Summit (the UN's World Summit on Sustainable Development), population as a key component of sustainable development was still absent from the agenda.