The Earth Summits are decennial meetings of world leaders, organized since 1972 with help of the United Nations, to help defining ways to stimulate sustainable development at the global level. The aim is to bring together the best individuals and organisations humanity can bring forward from all kind of categories of life, to identify and update what are humanity's most pressing challenges, to quantify them, identify solutions and develop a plan of action not to run into a wall. This plan of action is called Agenda 21 and implemented by many local governments under the name Local Agenda 21. The plan of action is designed as a TQM - Total Quality Manual, designed smartly and open enough, so that also organisations, companies and individuals can use it as a basis for their own plan of action and guidance not to miss out on important issue; it helps speed up understanding and identifying partners by e.g. using similar wordings and symbols. The 2000-2015 Millennium Development Goals and the 2015-2030 Global Goals are results from these Earth Summits. The first summit took place in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 1992 . Last Earth Summit, called Rio+20, also took place in Rio de Janeiro in 2012. Evidence of the development of a global culture of respect for the environment, the Earth Summits are symbolically very important as - together with the United Nations ObservancesCalendar - they aim to demonstrate the collective capacity to manage, address and bring attention to humanities most pressing challenges, global problems and affirm the need to respect ecological constraints. The 1972 summit gave birth to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), while the 1992 Summit launched the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), whose signatory countries have met annually since 1995. Procedure The entry into force of an international treaty usually takes several years. This is a complex process as each country needs to complete two steps to join: signing the treaty, and then ratifying it formally. The treaty enters into force only when a sufficient number of countries have ratified it (the number varies from one treaty to another). The signatory countries of this type of treaty organize, roughly once a year, a conference of the parties (COP). Before each conference there is a preparatory meeting called the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) where governments negotiate the technical details of the treaty.