Reflections on The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development

Rio de Janeiro — The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) concluded on June 22. While there was some general disappointment that Rio + 20 fell short in terms of overall outcomes and commitments for sustainable development, World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Margaret Chan called the conference “a victory for health”. This is a big testimony to the collective advocacy by the global health community — one reinforced in this video produced by Framing the Cause and featuring an interview with Maria Blair, ACS national vice president of strategy. The importance of health to sustainable development was scarcely mentioned and noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) were completely absent when the Zero Draft of the Rio+20 outcome document was released in January.

NCDs such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, and diabetes are the leading causes of death in the world, accounting for 63% of global deaths with developing countries facing a majority of the burden. Failure to adequately address these diseases will undermine any sustainable development efforts, while there are important synergies between efforts for NCD prevention and control and wider sustainable development initiatives, goals, and targets. With this belief, the American Cancer Society and its global partners launched a concerted effort to make sure that health and NCDs were a priority at Rio+20 negotiations.

During the conference, the Society, in collaboration with the NCD Alliance hosted an official UN side event at Rio+20 on “Health within the Green Economy: Multisectoral Frameworks for NCD Control and Sustainable Development”. The event included Olav Kjørven, UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Director of the Bureau for Development Policy who spoke about NCDs as a development issue and the need for integrated action to address the NCD burden. National Vice President of the American Cancer Society Maria Blair emphasized the need for Strong leadership and collaboration to effectively face the NCD challenge.

The Society also took on the responsibility of coordinating the efforts of the Rio+20 NGO Health Cluster. The Health Cluster, which advocated to strengthen attention to health and specific global health priorities in the Rio+20 outcomes document, comprised 45 organizations across the globe working in the area of public health.

Our efforts, along with those of other health and development NGOs, WHO, the host government Brazil, and some active Member States, have paid off.In the final Rio+20 outcome document, there are several health references and one section devoted entirely to the importance of health. Health is recognized as “a precondition for, an outcome of, and indicator of all three dimensions of sustainable development.” The significance of NCDs and the importance of strengthened prevention and control efforts are also included in the final document, a victory for this conference. In the text, UN Member States acknowledge “the global burden and threat of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) constitutes one of the major challenges for sustainable development in the twenty-first century” and go on to: commit to promote affordable access to prevention, treatment, care and support related to NCDs, commit to establish or strengthen multi-sectoral national policies for the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases and encourage the provision of assistance to developing countries.

Earlier in May, the World Health Assembly committed to a global target of achieving a 25% reduction in premature deaths from NCDs by 2025. The coverage of NCDs in the Rio+20 outcome document have helped to further expand global attention to these diseases beyond the global health policy agenda to inclusion in the wider global development agenda. We must build upon this momentum to make sure that health is at the forefront of national health and development planning and NCDs are fully integrated in future global development goals. As the UN and WHO work to strengthen institutional frameworks and metrics for global and national NCD prevention and control, ACS will continue to work with its partners worldwide to strengthen NCD prevention and control, thereby preventing cancer, saving lives, and diminishing suffering from cancer.

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