Environmental Studies

Formally known as the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), the Brundtland Commission's mission is to unite countries to pursue sustainable development together. The Chairman of the Commission was Gro Harlem Brundtland.
The Commission aims to create a united international community with shared sustainability goals by identifying sustainability problems worldwide, raising awareness about them, and suggesting the implementation of solutions. In 1987, the Brundtland Commission published the first volume of “Our Common Future,” the organization's main report, which strongly influenced the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 and the third UN Conference on Environment and Development in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2002.

Statement 1 is wrong: The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is an international institution (a programme, rather than an agency of the UN) that coordinates United Nations environmental activities, assisting developing countries in implementing environmentally sound policies and practices.
Statement 2 is also wrong: It was founded as a result of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in June 1972 and has its headquarters in the Gigiri neighborhood of Nairobi, Kenya. UNEP also has six regional offices and various country offices.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is the foremost authority on threatened species, and treats threatened species not as a single category, but as a group of three categories, depending on the degree to which they are threatened:

Statement 1 is wrong: Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization with offices in over forty countries and with an international coordinating body in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Statement 2 is also wrong as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is not a fund but an international non-governmental organization working on issues regarding the conservation, research and restoration of the environment, formerly named the World Wildlife Fund, which remains its official name in Canada and the United States. It is the world's largest independent conservation organization. It has nothing to do with Greenpeace.

Eutrophication is the ecosystem response to the addition of artificial or natural substances, such as nitrates and phosphates, through fertilizers or sewage, to an aquatic system. One example is the "bloom" or great increase of phytoplankton in a water body as a response to increased levels of nutrients. Negative environmental effects include hypoxia, the depletion of oxygen in the water, which induces reductions in specific fish and other animal populations.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a scientific intergovernmental body initially set up in 1988 by two United Nations organizations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and later endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC or FCCC) is an international environmental treaty, not an organization. To eliminate this choice, a student needs to be acquainted with its full-form.

Statement 1 is correct: The Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme is an Intergovernmental Scientific Programme aiming to set a scientific basis for the improvement of the relationships between people and their environment globally. IT was launched in 1970s.
Statement 2 is wrong: The MAB programme is being run under the aegis of UNESCO.

The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety is an international agreement on biosafety, as a supplement to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Biosafety Protocol seeks to protect biological diversity from the potential risks posed by genetically modified organisms resulting from modern biotechnology.
The Protocol entered into force on 11 September 2003.

Genetically modified crops (GM crops, or biotech crops) are plants, the DNA of which has been modified using genetic engineering techniques, to resist pests and agents causing harm to plants and to improve the growth of these plants to assist in farmer's efficiency.
Genetic engineering techniques are much more precise than mutagenesis (mutation breeding) where an organism is exposed to radiation or chemicals to create a non-specific but stable change.

        Biosphere Reserves</b>|    <b>Number of
        Countries</b>|

| Africa| 74| 33|
| Arab States| 26| 11|
| Asia and the Pacific| 107| 28|
| Europe and North America| 261| 33|
| Latin America and the Caribbean| 109| 20|

Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) is a global program that provides funding and technical assistance to nongovernmental organizations and participation to protect the Earth's richest regions of plant and animal diversity, while World Wide Fund for Nature is an international non-governmental organization.

A biodiversity hotspot is a region with a significant reservoir of biodiversity that is under threat from humans.

Agenda 21 is a non-binding, voluntarily implemented action plan of the United Nations with regard to sustainable development. It is a product of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992.
The "21" in Agenda 21 refers to the 21st century.

In a food chain, energy flows from producers to consumers to decomposers. The sequence Fish → Salmon → Brown Bear represents increasing trophic levels, where each level preys on the previous one. Bacteria and fungi are decomposers that break down dead organisms at the end of the chain.