Isabela Vieira      Reporter Agência Brasil

Rio de Janeiro – Giancarlo Summa, the head of the United Nations Information Center for Brazil, told Agência Brasil yesterday that around 25% of the Joint Final Declaration that will be signed by all the nations represented at the conference was ready (more than 180 countries are present). Summa said that some items will be resolved easily, matters of vocabulary and punctuation, for example, while others involving policy will have to be ironed out in intense negotiations. In order to speed up those negotiations, talks were held in New York prior to the conference.

The first press conference on the Joint Final Declaration took place yesterday afternoon shortly after the conference was declared open. Sha Zukang, a Chinese diplomat, who is the UN Rio+20 secretary general, revealed that the document has some 400 items.

EBC is covering Rio+20 with multimedia reporting that can be followed (in Portuguese) at: cobertura multimídia da Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC) sobre a Rio+20

Allen Bennett – translator/editor The News in English

Link - Cerca de 25% do documento final da Rio+20 estão fechados, diz diretor da ONU