Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The result, as so often with UN and other international conferences, was a compromise in the concept of “sustainable development. . . . Yet the Stockholm conference of 1972 had significant consequences, many more than its critics allowed. The first was the establishment of the UN Environment Programme to be the focal point of the world body’s efforts to grapple with environmental matters and to be a coordinator and stimulator to the other parts of the system. . . . Under a series of very vigorous executive directors, UNEP was to push its agendas to the forefront of the UN’s nonmilitary concerns by monitoring the state of the planet, prodding other agencies, acting as a database, and pushing for many improvements in, for example, international environment law and standards. In addition, the mobilization of the NGO movement at the Stockholm conference was the unleashing of a genie that could never be put back into the bottle; all future UN global conferences were to a large degree modeled on this one, and in particular on the need to relate to international civic society." [Kennedy: Parliament of Man, Kindle, Location 2657-88]