What is the
Earth Charter?

The Earth Charter is an ethical framework for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society in the 21st century. It is centrally concerned with the transition to sustainable ways of living and sustainable human development.

Eight things you
can do today

  1. Disseminate the Earth Charter and raise awareness about it among your friends and in your local community.
  2. Endorse the Earth Charter and encourage the organizations to which you belong and your local and national governments to use and endorse the Earth Charter.
  3. Start an Earth Charter study group and explore how to use the Earth Charter and apply its principles in your home, work place, and local community.
  4. Use the Earth Charter in your activities, work, research or planning.
  5. Become a volunteer by helping ECI with a specific task or by setting up an action group on Education, or in your field of work.
  6. Collaborate with Earth Charter Partners and Affiliates and with other organizations that have endorsed the Earth Charter in your region.
  7. Make financial contributions or provide other resources and needed services in support of Earth Charter International and other Earth Charter projects.
  8. Consult and follow the Action Guidelines for Decentralized Expansion of the Earth Charter Movement.

Ways to use the
Earth Charter

  1. Educational tool for developing understanding of the critical challenges and choices facing humanity and the meaning of a sustainable way of living.
  2. Call to action and an ethical guide to a sustainable way of life that can inspire commitment, cooperation, and change.
  3. Values framework to guide governments at all levels in the design of policies and strategies for building a just, sustainable and peaceful world.
  4. Comprehensive framework for defining corporate social and ecological responsibility and formulating related mission statements and professional codes of conduct.
  5. Catalyst for multi-sectoral, cross-cultural and inter-religious dialogue on common goals, shared values and global ethics.
  6. CSoft law document that provides an ethical foundation for the on-going development of environmental and sustainable development law.
  7. Instrument for assessing progress toward the goal of sustainability.

History of The Earth Charter

In 1987 The World Commission on Environment and Development (known as “the Brundtland Commission”) launched Our Common Future Report with a call for a “new charter” to set “new norms” to guide the transition to sustainable development.

Following that, discussion about an Earth Charter took place in the process leading to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, but the time for such a declaration was not right. The Rio Declaration became the statement of the achievable consensus at that time.

In 1994, Maurice Strong (Secretary-General of the Rio Summit) and Mikhail Gorbachev, working through organizations they each founded (Earth Council and Green Cross International respectively), launched an initiative (with the support from the Dutch Government) to develop an Earth Charter as a civil society initiative. The initial drafting and consultation process drew on hundreds of international documents.

An independent Earth Charter Commission was formed in 1997 to oversee the development of the text, analyze the outcomes of a world-wide consultation process and to come to agreement on a global consensus document.

In March 1997 at the Rio+5 Forum, a first Benchmark Draft of the Earth Charter is released as a “document in progress”. Ongoing international consultations were encouraged and organized.

In April 1999 a Benchmark Draft II of the Earth Charter is released and international consultations continue particularly through Earth Charter National Committees and international dialogues.

After numerous drafts and after considering the input of people from all regions of the world, the Earth Charter Commission came to consensus on the Earth Charter in March, 2000, at a meeting held at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The Earth Charter was later formally launched in ceremonies at The Peace Palace in The Hague.

The Earth Charter is now increasingly recognized as a global consensus statement on the meaning of sustainability, the challenge and vision of sustainable development, and the principles by which sustainable development is to be achieved. It is used as a basis for peace negotiations, as a reference document in the development of global standards and codes of ethics, as resource for governance and legislative processes, as a community development tool, as an educational framework for sustainable development, and in many other contexts. The Charter was also an important influence on the Plan of Implementation for the UNESCO Decade for Education on Sustainable Development.