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Mashable’s Pete Cashmore talks Rio+20

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UN News Centre‘s Florencia Soto-Nino met up with Mashable Founder and CEO Pete Cashmore at the the Rio+Social event held alongside the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.  Here are his answers to three questions about the Future We Want.

Mashable Founder and CEO Pete Cashmore at Rio+Social

How did you first think you could link technology and social media with sustainable issues?

Mashable got involved in social good very early on. Back in 2007 when there started to be this movement of social media for social good. We actually had a September birthday and we met this charity called Charity Water that was letting people give away their birthdays as a way to raise money on the social networks and instead of giving you gifts people could just donate to Charity Water. We used the Mashable account to raise $10,000 dollars, to build two wells in Africa and that really opened my eyes to how powerful social media could be and it was an embryonic thing and an early thing but I realized this could be very powerful.

We had also been hosting events at the 92Y Community Center in New York and we got talking to them about social media and social good coming together, and they had worked with the UN Foundation previously and so it seemed like a great marriage to have a conference. The first year it was a very small conference, but every year it has gotten bigger and bigger and last year the Social Good Summit in September in New York was just huge, we had a lot of big names coming around, Serena Williams was there, obviously Ted Turner comes every year, Desmond Tutu, Richard Gere… it was an all-star line up, but also people who have been doing really great stuff in their own communities, who are just doing phenomenal things and taking them into their own hands to social good.

Rio+Social is an extension of that. We are here in Rio talking about specific sustainability issues, how can we bring the social media people in, how can we bring the bloggers in, how can we make this accessible? Because this is really the key thing on the social good summit, you have people talking about the big problems of the world but how do you make it accessible to everyone, so to make everyone feel they can solve those problems? So we get the social media engaged and talking about these issues and hopefully talking about it after this event as well.

Which issue is most important to you among those being discussed in Rio +20?

I think that the problem that entrepreneurs are most able to solve is how do we come up with creative solutions to the energy problem. Obviously burning fossil fuels is not something that is sustainable in the long term, and we need alternatives to power the world and to power our growth. So I think entrepreneurs are really looking at what are the opportunities, because it’s a win-win, if people can figure out how to solve these problems there is a lot of money in that. I think we are going to see a lot of the solutions to come from the private sector, from companies that really want to innovate because they see a need and a demand.

Even in Silicon Valley, which is typically known for computer hardware and software and apps, you see electric cars companies, alternative energy companies, being funded by the same people that funded Internet companies. It is a huge opportunity and I think people are really excited about solving that problem.

People were a little skeptical on social activism. Do you think that perception has changed since the Arab Spring?

I think it was a problem earlier on and certainly in the earlier Social Good Summit a lot of the dialogue was about how we managed to create a lot of conversations, but is there anyone doing something? So we started thinking about how to raise money, how to create change and make people do stuff.

I think people stopped asking that question after they realized that revolutions were happening around the world powered by social media, and it became obvious to everyone that the world was changing very quickly, much quicker than they expected, with political and power structures being upturned, so I think people are less skeptical now, and people are beginning to see that social media can drive a change in action and not just create buzz.

I hope that with this Summit we can start the conversation online and really get people a voice and an influence online because this is the role of social media. I think people may sometimes feel disenchanted that things are not being done, but we all have a voice now and we all have the ability to change things we do not like. We are not powerless, we can actually do things about it now. This is what events like Rio+Social are about, giving everybody a voice in the conversation so that change might actually happen.

Related information

What was it like to be in Rio for both the 1992 and 2012 conferences?

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Pragati Pascale, Spokesperson for Rio+20

In this blog post, spokesperson for Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development and veteran United Nations staff member Pragati Pascale reflects on her experience being at the first Rio Earth Summit.

How did you get involved with the first Earth Summit, and what was your role?

I saw an article that the UN would be holding this major conference on environment and development, and I thought, wow, that would be very interesting to work on, so I asked around for who would be working on it, and I expressed my interest at an early stage.

For over a year, we worked on the communications leading up to the Earth Summit. This was before the days of the Internet and e-mail – can you imagine that?  Even the fax machine was just coming out – I don’t think we had one until after the conference.

At the Summit itself, we had over 9,000 journalists – it may have been the biggest press participation we ever had at a UN conference.  I worked with the Conference Spokesperson’s team on organizing the press conference schedule – which was chock-a- block from morning to evening, for two weeks straight — and getting the journalists the information they needed.

It was the first time that the UN put on such a large-scale event, and we were not totally prepared for the numbers.  I remember at some points, in order to get our work done, we stationed some local staff outside to try to answer media questions and we had to sort of barricade the door to our office.  But we learned fast how to put on very large summits!

What do you believe was the most successful element of the Earth Summit?

It was a visionary event and it inspired participation by thousands of people.  It was the first UN conference that had such a large NGO and civil society component, and that was key to its success in starting to get sustainable development into the popular awareness. The NGO Forum downtown was really happening.

The outcome document, Agenda 21, was a groundbreaking agreement – a blueprint for sustainable development that was put together over months with help from experts brought together from many fields by Maurice Strong, the Conference Secretary-General.  It is still the foundation document for sustainable development – and it has been used as a guide for local Agenda 21’s in thousands of cities and towns around the world, and at the national level too. The Rio Declaration and the Forest Principles were also agreed, and the Climate Change and Biodiversity Conventions were opened for signature.

Where do you think the Earth Summit might have fallen short in what it was trying to achieve?

The negotiations exposed the fault lines between North and South on sustainable development issues, which were a challenge then and continue to be so in many complex ways.

Whereas many developed country governments and NGOs came in with a let’s save the planet approach, it became clear that developing countries felt the North had an historic responsibility for many global environment and development problems, and they had serious concerns about not having constraints placed on their growth.

So before Governments could agree on solutions to the problems, they had to first establish principles like “common but differentiated responsibilities” (Rio Declaration, principle 7)

What do you feel might be different at Rio+20 in comparison to Rio 1992?

We’re at a different stage of the process.  Twenty years ago sustainable development was a visionary concept  – and governments agreed on the foundations.

Now, as the Secretary-General and Conference Secretary-General Sha Zukang have been saying, we have to keep working on implementation – on making sustainable development happen.   The concept of innovative multi-partner initiatives has emerged since Rio as a way to generate concrete action – and we are seeing number of important commitments to be announced in Rio by governments, businesses, UN agencies and other partners.

The Future We Want is the slogan for the Rio+20 outreach campaign, and we’ve seen an overwhelming number of people — including hundreds of millions of people on social media — making their voices heard about the future they want.  In that regard, I think we are recapturing some of the original spirit of Rio.