The United Nations Environment Organization Proposal: History, Design and Why It Stalled

The United Nations Environment Organization (UNEO) is an institution that does not exist. It is a long-running proposal to replace or upgrade the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) with a stronger body, usually described as a "specialized agency" of the UN system along the lines of the World Health Organization (WHO). The idea reached its political high point in February 2007, when French President Jacques Chirac read out the "Paris Call for Action" backed by around 46 countries, and it was debated again in the run-up to the 2012 Rio+20 Earth Summit. In the end, governments chose to strengthen UNEP rather than transform it.

To understand the UNEO debate, it helps to understand what UNEP is, why critics thought it was too weak, what a UNEO would have looked like, who supported and opposed it, and what was done instead. This article covers that history, the institutional design questions, the arguments on each side, the outcome at Rio+20 and afterward, and some common misunderstandings about how the UN system works.

Background: how the UN deals with the environment

The UN system in brief

The United Nations is not one organization but a family of bodies with different legal statuses:

The difference matters. A programme is in legal terms a subsidiary of the General Assembly. A specialized agency is an independent international organization with its own constitution, its own member states, its own governing assembly and, crucially, a budget funded by compulsory "assessed" contributions from members. The UNEO proposal was essentially a proposal to move environmental governance from the first column to the second.

The birth of UNEP (1972)

UNEP was created after the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the first major UN conference on environmental issues, which produced the Stockholm Declaration. The General Assembly established UNEP through Resolution 2997, and its headquarters were placed in Nairobi, Kenya.

According to Wikipedia, at its founding UNEP was backed by a five-year fund of more than US$100 million, to which the United States pledged US$40 million. Its core funding source became the Environment Fund, to which member states contribute voluntarily.

UNEP's executive directors have been:

What UNEP achieved

UNEP's defenders point to a substantial record. Wikipedia describes the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances as UNEP's most acclaimed success, and UNEP is an implementing agency for the Protocol's Multilateral Fund. The Wikipedia UNEO article credits UNEP with creating agreements including the Basel Convention on hazardous waste, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Montreal Protocol. UNEP hosts or supports the secretariats of several treaties, including the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Minamata Convention on Mercury, the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions on chemicals and waste, the Convention on Migratory Species, and CITES, the convention on trade in endangered species.

UNEP has also been strong in scientific assessment. The Wikipedia UNEO article says it has done best in monitoring and assessment, including its Global Environment Outlook reports.

Why critics thought UNEP was too weak

Despite these successes, by the 1990s and 2000s many governments, scholars and environmental groups argued that UNEP was not equipped for the scale of global environmental problems. The Wikipedia UNEO article summarizes five main criticisms.

Status. As a programme created by a General Assembly resolution, UNEP has less independence and authority than specialized agencies such as the WHO or UNESCO. It cannot adopt binding rules for its members in the way some agencies can, and its governing body was, until 2013, a Governing Council with limited membership.

Location. Nairobi is far from the political centers of New York, where the General Assembly sits, and Geneva, where many UN agencies and treaty secretariats are based. Critics argued this distance contributed to fragmented governance and made it harder for UNEP to coordinate with other agencies.

Funding. UNEP relied on voluntary contributions rather than mandatory assessments. That made its finances unstable and, according to critics, gave certain large donors undue influence over its priorities. The vulnerability was demonstrated years later, in 2018, when, as Wikipedia records, the Netherlands withheld €8 million after allegations about executive director Erik Solheim's travel, and Sweden and Denmark also halted funding.

Coordination. UNEP was meant to be the "anchor" institution for the global environment, but it struggled to coordinate the growing number of environmental treaties and agencies, many of which had their own secretariats and governing bodies. The Wikipedia article also notes that UNEP's reporting was fragmented across eight divisions and hard to search.

Mission drift. Critics said UNEP had shifted from its normative role (setting standards and assessing the state of the environment) toward implementation projects in countries, moving it away from its strengths.

Behind all of these lay the problem of "treaty congestion." The Wikipedia UNEO article refers to more than 500 multilateral environmental agreements. Each has its own meetings, reporting requirements and secretariat, often in a different city. For small or poor countries, simply keeping up with the meetings is a heavy burden.

Origins of the idea: from a "world environment organization" to the UNEO

Decades of proposals

The UNEO was one version of a broader idea. Frank Biermann, a leading scholar of global environmental governance, has written that a proposal for an international environmental agency has been debated for over forty years, under names including "World Environment Organization" (WEO), "Global Environment Organization" and "United Nations Environment Organization." The American scholar Daniel Esty wrote on the idea in 1994 and 1996, and Biermann and Udo Simonis published proposals in 1998 for a world organization for environment and development.

Germany, Brazil, Singapore and South Africa (1997)

The idea entered high-level diplomacy in the 1990s. According to a German-language analysis by Biermann, Chancellor Helmut Kohl unexpectedly advocated an "environmental security council" in the mid-1990s, and in 1997 Germany made an official proposal for a "global umbrella organization" for the environment. This was in line with a joint declaration by Brazil, Germany, Singapore and South Africa of 23 June 1997, issued at the UN General Assembly's special session five years after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (often called Rio+5).

The European Union and France

The European Union became the main institutional champion of the UNEO. The Wikipedia article states that after the 58th session of the UN General Assembly, EU member states proposed turning UNEP into a UNEO. France was the most prominent single backer. Jacques Chirac made the UNEO a personal cause, and the French government's foreign minister Bernard Kouchner later gave a speech on international environmental governance and the UNEO project, cited in the Wikipedia article.

Academic and policy work fleshed out the idea. A collection edited by Andreas Rechkemmer, UNEO – Towards an International Environment Organization, was published by Nomos in 2005. Nils Meyer-Ohlendorf and Markus Knigge wrote a 2007 report, A United Nations Environment Organization, for the Center for UN Reform Education. Maria Ivanova, then at Yale, wrote a working paper assessing UNEP's performance as the "anchor institution for the global environment."

The High-level Panel (2006)

In November 2006, a UN High-level Panel on system-wide coherence, set up by the Secretary-General, recommended, according to the Wikipedia article, that UNEP be upgraded and given real authority as the environmental policy pillar of the UN system. The panel did not use the UNEO label, but it reinforced the sense that UNEP's status was a problem.

The Paris Call for Action (February 2007)

The setting

The UNEO's moment in the spotlight came in early 2007. On 2 February 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the first part of its Fourth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Voice of America reported that the report was reviewed by roughly 2,500 scientists from 113 countries, and Reuters summarized its conclusion that global warming was man-made and that rising temperatures could bring droughts, heatwaves and rising seas for more than 1,000 years even if emissions were capped.

The same weekend, France hosted a two-day conference on global ecological governance at the Élysée Palace in Paris, held on 2 and 3 February 2007 under the banner "Citizens of the Earth."

The call

At the close of the conference, Chirac read out the "Paris Call for Action." According to Reuters' environment correspondent Alister Doyle, writing on 3 February 2007, 46 nations called for a more powerful UN environment agency, saying humanity's survival was at risk. The appeal proposed a new UN Environment Organisation to tackle global warming, water shortages and the loss of species, and urged "massive international action to face the environmental crisis." The call also proposed a Universal Declaration of Environmental Rights and Duties.

Reuters quoted the text: "We must realise that we have reached a point of no return, and have caused irreparable damage." It quoted Chirac: "We are coming to realise that the entire planet is at risk." Reuters reported that the UNEO would be modeled on the World Health Organization, which has more influence than UNEP, and could coordinate government action, promote funding and research, and help spread new technologies.

Who signed and who did not

Reuters reported that the supporters included European Union countries and nations such as Algeria, Ecuador, Cambodia, Vanuatu, the Seychelles, Gabon and Burundi. The United States, China, Russia and India, which Reuters identified as the top four emitters of greenhouse gases at the time, were missing from the list distributed by Chirac's office. The Wikipedia UNEO article adds Brazil to the list of major countries not included.

Sources give slightly different counts. Reuters and Voice of America reported 46 countries. Other news reports at the time said 45 countries, and AFP quoted Chirac as saying the proposal had the support of some 40 countries. The Wikipedia article itself is inconsistent, giving 46 backers in one place and 52 countries in another; the higher figure appears to refer to the later "Group of Friends of the UNEO." The safest summary is that roughly 40 to 46 countries backed the Paris Call.

Reactions

Voice of America reported that former US Vice President Al Gore welcomed Chirac's efforts. Reuters quoted Valli Moosa, then head of the World Conservation Union (IUCN): "We spend a great deal more on space research than trying to find out what the biosphere is all about." Reuters also noted that some delegates warned that new bureaucracy should not distract from action, while others said a UNEO could help fill gaps in environmental science.

A political problem was obvious from the start. Reuters observed that Chirac was due to retire in May 2007 after 12 years as president, leaving it unclear who would champion the idea.

The Group of Friends of the UNEO

Morocco agreed to host a meeting of supporting nations. According to the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), the first meeting of the Group of Friends of the UNEO was held in Agadir, Morocco, in April 2007 (IISD gives 12 to 13 April; a Moroccan news report gives 13 to 14 April). Participants noted what they described as a broad consensus in favor of general reform of the system and discussed how to move forward on setting up a UNEO, including its mandate and institutional aspects. The Wikipedia article says the Group of Friends had 52 states from every geographic region and that some members hoped a new US administration would make a UNEO more likely.

At UNEP's Governing Council session in 2007, the Wikipedia article reports, the EU again called for a significant strengthening of UNEP, saying an upgrade to a UNEO would help it fulfil its mandate.

What a UNEO would have looked like

Proponents never agreed on a single blueprint, but the Wikipedia article and the policy literature it cites describe a typical design.

Legal status

A UNEO would be a specialized agency within the UN system, linked to ECOSOC through a relationship agreement, with budgetary autonomy. Like the WHO, it would be founded on its own treaty. Its membership could therefore differ from UN membership: countries would join by ratifying the treaty. That also meant, as the Wikipedia article notes, that creating a UNEO would not require consensus across the whole UN. A coalition of willing states could establish it, and others could join later.

Structure

Like other specialized agencies, a UNEO would have three main organs:

Mandate

According to the Wikipedia article, a UNEO's role would likely resemble UNEP's: pooling scientific knowledge, monitoring the state of the environment, setting norms and coordinating the more than 500 multilateral environmental agreements. Proponents argued that its elevated status would let it do these things more effectively, for example by clustering treaty secretariats or harmonizing reporting.

The Wikipedia article states that a UNEO would not adjudicate environmental disputes. That distinguishes it from the World Trade Organization, which has a dispute settlement system and is sometimes held up by critics as a contrast: trade rules can be enforced, environmental rules mostly cannot.

Funding

The key financial change would be assessed contributions. Member states would be obliged to pay a share of the operating budget according to an assessment scale (as they do for the UN regular budget and for agencies like the WHO), while voluntary contributions would continue to fund specific projects. The Wikipedia article notes that a UNEO would have its own assessment scales.

A simple (hypothetical) illustration shows the difference. Suppose an organization has a core budget of $100 million. Under an assessment scale, a country assessed at 2% must pay $2 million a year, and one assessed at 0.01% pays $10,000. Under voluntary funding, any country can pay nothing, or can pay far more than its share and earmark the money for its own priorities. Assessed funding gives predictability and spreads responsibility; voluntary funding gives donors flexibility and influence. The UNEO debate was in large part an argument about which of those properties mattered more.

A WHO for the environment?

The WHO comparison was central to the French and EU pitch, and it is worth understanding what it implied. The WHO is a specialized agency with near-universal membership, a World Health Assembly, an executive board, a director-general, assessed contributions and the authority to adopt certain regulations that bind members unless they opt out. Proponents saw that model as a way to give environmental issues the same institutional weight as health.

The analogy has limits. Even the WHO depends heavily on voluntary, earmarked funding for much of its work, and its authority depends on member states' willingness to comply. A UNEO built on the WHO model would not automatically have been able to force governments to cut emissions or protect species.

Arguments for and against

The case for a UNEO

The Wikipedia article summarizes supporters' arguments as raising the political profile of environmental issues, improving coordination and providing stable funding. In more detail:

1. Status and voice. A specialized agency would sit as an equal alongside the WHO, the International Labour Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization and others, giving environment ministers a stronger institutional base in negotiations with trade, finance and development bodies.
2. Coordination. A stronger central body could reduce fragmentation among hundreds of treaties and many secretariats, save money and make it easier for developing countries to participate.
3. Stable funding. Assessed contributions would end dependence on a small number of donors.
4. Science. A UNEO could build on UNEP's assessment work and help fill gaps in environmental knowledge, as some delegates argued in Paris.
5. Coalition route. Because it could be created by treaty among willing states, it did not require every country to agree at once.

The case against

The Wikipedia article identifies two main objections:

1. Development concerns. Some states, particularly in the developing world, feared that a powerful environment organization would put environmental policy ahead of economic development and poverty eradication, and might be used to impose conditions on poorer countries.
2. Strengthen first. Others argued that UNEP should be strengthened first, and that institutional reform was a distraction from implementation.

Other concerns raised in the debate included:

• Bureaucracy. As some delegates warned in Paris, creating a new organization takes years of negotiation and could absorb political energy better spent on action.
• Sovereignty. Major powers, including the United States, China, Russia and India, did not sign the Paris Call, and a UNEO without them would have limited reach on the biggest global problems, especially climate change.
• Where the action is. Many of the most important environmental regimes, such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, have their own institutions and processes. A UNEO might not be able to absorb or direct them.
• Location. For Kenya and other African states, the question of where any upgraded body would sit was politically important; at Rio+20 they pressed for a specialized UNEP, and the final text called for consolidating headquarters functions in Nairobi.

The road to Rio+20

The Nairobi-Helsinki process (2010–2011)

After the Paris Call, debate continued inside UNEP. In February 2010, UNEP's Governing Council set up a consultative group of ministers and high-level representatives (decision SS.XI/1 of 26 February 2010) to prepare options for reforming international environmental governance. The resulting set of options became known as the Nairobi-Helsinki Outcome, which the Governing Council welcomed in February 2011, and which was passed to the preparatory process for the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development.

According to IISD's reporting, two of the five options dealt directly with environmental governance institutions:

The other three options focused more broadly on sustainable development governance. Delegations disagreed over whether the mandate covered all five options or only those focused on environmental governance.

Rio+20 (June 2012)

The UN Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+20, was held in Rio de Janeiro from 13 to 22 June 2012, twenty years after the 1992 Earth Summit. Wikipedia records 45,400 accredited participants and 88 heads of state or government. Its outcome document, The Future We Want, was non-binding.

On the institutional question, the specialized agency proposal was not adopted. Reporting from the conference recorded that some delegations wanted UNEP transformed into a full environment organization of equal status with other agencies, while others favored upgrading UNEP through various measures without specialized agency status. The United States warned that the issue of a specialized UNEP should not be reopened, or the delicate balance of the outcome document would be disturbed. Kenya, which hosts UNEP, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were the most vocal countries in the final plenary in reiterating their demand for a specialized UNEP.

Paragraph 88: strengthen and upgrade

The compromise was paragraph 88 of The Future We Want, which committed governments to "strengthen and upgrade" UNEP through eight measures, labeled (a) to (h). Wikipedia's summary of the conference describes the recommendations as including strengthening UNEP's governance so it could become a "leading global environmental authority," establishing universal membership in its governing body, increasing its financial resources, and strengthening its role in key UN coordination bodies. The remaining sub-paragraphs addressed UNEP's science-policy interface, the dissemination of environmental information, capacity building in developing countries, consolidation of headquarters functions in Nairobi, and stakeholder participation.

The General Assembly endorsed The Future We Want in resolution 66/288 of 27 July 2012.

Resolution 67/213 and the UN Environment Assembly

On 21 December 2012, the General Assembly adopted resolution 67/213, deciding to strengthen and upgrade UNEP as set out in paragraph 88. A UN Secretariat oral statement on the draft resolution records that the Assembly decided to establish universal membership in UNEP's Governing Council and mandated it, at its first universal session in Nairobi in February 2013, to begin implementing paragraph 88 in its entirety and to recommend a new name reflecting its universal character. The statement also shows the practical side of the reform: the Secretary-General was asked to reflect paragraph 88 in the 2014–2015 budget proposal and to keep UNEP's regular budget needs under review. It estimated, for example, that new posts to strengthen internal accountability would cost $1,453,900 for the 2014–2015 biennium, and that 26 posts to strengthen UNEP's coordination role would cost about $6,018,200.

The universal body was renamed the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA). It has 193 members and meets every two years. Its first session was held in Nairobi from 23 to 27 June 2014. Later sessions included UNEA-6 (26 February to 1 March 2024) and UNEA-7 (8 to 12 December 2025, under the theme "Advancing sustainable solutions for a resilient planet").

Was this a UNEO by another name?

Opinions differ. One later analysis cited in reporting on the Rio+20 outcome argued that UNEP's governing decisions and General Assembly resolutions gave it some key attributes of a specialized agency without a treaty negotiation. Universal membership addressed one of the main criticisms, and regular budget funding increased predictability.

But the core features of the UNEO proposal were not adopted. UNEP remains a programme of the General Assembly rather than an independent agency with its own constitution. It still relies primarily on voluntary contributions through the Environment Fund and earmarked funds, as the 2018 funding suspensions showed. It does not have the authority to adopt binding rules. And the hundreds of environmental agreements remain separate. A UNEP-linked paper from 2012 acknowledged that the broader proposal to turn UNEP into a specialized agency was not going to be achieved at Rio+20.

Comparison: UNEP before 2012, UNEP after 2012, and the proposed UNEO

Timeline of the UNEO debate

Key actors and their positions

The table shows why the debate was hard to resolve. Support was broad in number but thin among the largest powers, and the developing countries that supported an upgrade were not always the same ones that had signed the Paris Call. There was no single coalition with both the numbers and the economic weight to carry a new treaty.

Lessons from the UNEO debate

Institutions follow political will, not the other way round

The UNEO proposal was built on the assumption that a stronger institution would lead to stronger action. Opponents argued the reverse: that institutions reflect the political will of their members. The absence of the United States, China, Russia, India and Brazil from the Paris Call illustrated the problem. A UNEO without the largest economies and emitters would struggle to make a difference on climate change.

Champions matter

The UNEO had one high-profile champion in Jacques Chirac, who left office within months of the Paris Call. The EU continued to support the idea, but without a head of state pushing it, the proposal lost momentum. Its next serious hearing, at Rio+20, came five years later in a very different political climate.

Incremental reform is the usual outcome

The UN system rarely creates or abolishes major institutions. The usual pattern is incremental reform, and that is what happened: universal membership, a new name, more regular budget funding and a mandate to be the "leading global environmental authority," without a new treaty.

Developing country concerns are central

The worry that a UNEO might subordinate development to environment was not peripheral, and the location question mattered too. Together they help explain why African states such as Kenya and the DRC pushed for a specialized UNEP based in Nairobi, rather than a new organization that could be based anywhere.

How the debate looks in the research literature

The UNEO question generated a substantial body of policy and academic writing, and the sources cited in the Wikipedia article give a sense of its range.

• Reform options papers. A July 2002 article in the Georgetown International Environmental Law Review surveyed options for reforming UNEP, at a time when governments were already discussing environmental governance ahead of the 2002 Johannesburg summit. Papers of this kind tended to lay out a spectrum running from modest internal improvements, through an upgraded UNEP, to a new organization.
• Blueprints. Rechkemmer's 2005 edited volume and Meyer-Ohlendorf and Knigge's 2007 report for the Center for UN Reform Education set out what a UNEO might contain: specialized agency status, assessed funding, a plenary, an executive organ and a secretariat, with a mandate broadly similar to UNEP's.
• Performance assessments. Ivanova's Yale working paper approached the question from the other end, asking how well UNEP had actually performed as the "anchor institution" for the global environment. That line of work emphasized UNEP's strengths in assessment and treaty-making alongside its weaknesses in coordination and funding, and it supported the view that the institution's design, not just its leadership, shaped its results.
• The world organization tradition. Biermann's writing placed the UNEO within a much longer debate, going back decades, about whether the world needs a central organization for environment and development, and how such a body might relate to trade and development institutions.

A recurring theme across this literature is that the label matters less than the specific powers and resources. A body called an "organization" with no reliable budget might be weaker than a well-funded "programme." That is one reason why many analysts judged the post-2012 reforms on whether they delivered universal participation and stable funding, rather than on whether UNEP's legal status changed.

Common misconceptions

"The UNEO exists." It does not. The UN environmental body is UNEP, whose governing body has since 2014 been the UN Environment Assembly. "UNEO" refers to a proposal.

"UNEP was renamed UNEO at Rio+20." No. Rio+20 strengthened UNEP and led to universal membership of its governing body, which was renamed the UN Environment Assembly. UNEP itself kept its name and status as a programme.

"A UNEO would have had power to punish polluters." The proposals described in the Wikipedia article did not include dispute settlement, and specialized agencies generally depend on member states' cooperation rather than enforcement.

"The whole world signed the Paris Call." Around 40 to 46 countries backed it, depending on the source. The United States, China, Russia and India did not.

"Only Europeans wanted a stronger environment agency." The EU and France were the leading advocates of the UNEO, but the 1997 joint declaration came from Brazil, Germany, Singapore and South Africa, and at Rio+20 the strongest final calls for a specialized UNEP came from Kenya and the DRC.

"UNEP has achieved nothing because it is weak." UNEP is credited with the Montreal Protocol, widely seen as one of the most successful environmental treaties, as well as the Basel Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity and a long series of scientific assessments.

"Becoming a specialized agency would automatically solve UNEP's funding problems." Assessed contributions would provide a stable core, but agencies such as the WHO still rely heavily on voluntary, earmarked funding for much of their work.

Frequently asked questions

What is the United Nations Environment Organization? A proposed specialized agency of the United Nations for the environment, intended to replace or upgrade UNEP with a body similar to the World Health Organization. It has never been created.

Who proposed the UNEO? The idea of a world environment organization was debated for decades by scholars and diplomats. EU member states proposed turning UNEP into a UNEO, and French President Jacques Chirac championed it, most visibly through the Paris Call for Action on 3 February 2007.

How many countries supported the Paris Call for Action? Reuters and Voice of America reported 46 countries; other reports gave 45 or about 40. A later Group of Friends of the UNEO was reported to have 52 member states.

Why did the UNEO not happen? Major powers, including the United States, China, Russia and India, did not support it; some developing countries feared it would put environment ahead of development; many preferred strengthening UNEP; and its main champion, Chirac, left office in 2007. At Rio+20 in 2012, governments chose to strengthen UNEP instead.

What changed for UNEP after Rio+20? General Assembly resolution 67/213 (21 December 2012) established universal membership in UNEP's governing body, which became the UN Environment Assembly with 193 members, and called for increased resources including from the UN regular budget.

What is the difference between a UN programme and a specialized agency? A programme, like UNEP, is created by a General Assembly resolution and reports to it, typically relying on voluntary funding. A specialized agency, like the WHO, is founded on its own treaty, has its own members and governing bodies, and is funded partly by compulsory assessed contributions.

Where is UNEP based? Nairobi, Kenya. Paragraph 88 of the Rio+20 outcome document called for the consolidation of UNEP's headquarters functions there.

Is the idea of a UNEO still alive? The proposal has not been formally revived since Rio+20, but the questions it raised, about funding, coordination among hundreds of environmental agreements and the status of environmental bodies relative to economic ones, remain part of debates about global environmental governance.

Summary

The United Nations Environment Organization was an attempt to give the environment the same institutional weight in the UN system as health, labor or food. Its supporters, led by the European Union and France, argued that UNEP, a programme based in Nairobi and funded by voluntary contributions, was too weak to coordinate more than 500 environmental agreements or to stand up to economic interests. The 2007 Paris Call for Action, issued in the wake of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, gave the idea its highest profile, but the largest emitters stayed out and its champion soon left office.

When governments returned to the question at Rio+20 in 2012, they chose a middle path: universal membership, a new UN Environment Assembly and more secure funding for UNEP, without the treaty, assessed budget and independent status of a specialized agency. Whether that compromise was enough is still debated. The UNEO debate remains a useful case study in how international institutions change: slowly, by compromise, and only as far as the most powerful members are willing to go.

Sources

• United Nations Environment Organization (Wikipedia)
• United Nations Environment Programme (Wikipedia)
• United Nations Environment Assembly (Wikipedia)
• United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) (Wikipedia)
• Reuters via NBC News: 46 nations call for tougher U.N. environment role (3 February 2007)
• Voice of America: 46 countries back French call for new world environmental agency (2007)
• IISD SDG Knowledge Hub: Group of Friends of the UNEO meeting, Agadir (2007)
• IISD SDG Knowledge Hub: UNEP on international environmental governance (Nairobi-Helsinki outcome)
• UN Secretariat oral statement on draft resolution A/C.2/67/L.44 (strengthening UNEP, 2012)
• UN General Assembly resolution 67/213 (UN Digital Library)
• Third World Network: Rio+20 update on institutional framework
• Biermann, F. Eine Weltorganisation für Umwelt und Entwicklung: Ein Vorschlag (AWI ePIC)
• Biermann, F. Needed now: A World Environment and Development Organization (AWI ePIC)