Jake Schmidt, International Climate Policy Director, Washington, DC

Three years ago, the Group of 20 countries pledged to phase out environmentally-harmful and ineffective subsidies. The leaders of these twenty influential countries have since made many other promises to deal with climate change and the range of global sustainability challenges, including at the recently concluded Clean Energy Ministerial. As countries meet this week to set the agenda for 2012, they should commit to showing leadership where it counts. This June, we need to turn pledges into real actions starting at the G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, and continuing through to the Rio+20 Earth Summit (read here and here for ideas).

NRDC, with Stakeholder Forum and Road to Rio+20, recently launched the Earth Summit Watch – a country-by-country progress tracker of the ambition (or lack thereof) of preparations before we all meet in Rio.  The UN recently announced that 130 heads of state are already committed to attend Rio+20, but has not released their names, nor is there much information on how their governments are preparing for Rio+20. Therefore, we are gathering our own information on a handful of important questions from countries (“Will your head of state attend?” or “What ...

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