| 1 | Name: | Mr. Maurice Frederick Strong | |
| Institution: | United Nation's University for Peace; Peking University; Environmental Foundation, China; Institute for Research on Security and Sustainability for Northeast Asia | ||
| Year Elected: | 1993 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1929 | ||
| Death Date: | November 28, 2015 | ||
A native of Canada, Maurice Strong grew up during the Great Depression, escaping poverty to become a successful businessman in the oil and utilities industries. He became a senior advisor to United Nations' Secretary General Kofi Annan. In 1972, as director of the U.N. Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, he successfully placed global environmental issues on the international agenda for the first time, and twenty years later, in 1992 he convened the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the largest international conference in history. Attended by 110 heads of state and government, the conference resulted in the adoption of Agenda 21, securing a global consensus and political commitment at the highest level on the sustainable development required to bring global population numbers in line with the finite resources of the Earth. At the conference, Mr. Strong called on the leaders of the world's wealthiest nations to extend significant financial aid to developing countries as reparation for a century of industrial development and environmental degradation. Maurice Strong held a number of other prominent positions, including senior advisor to the president of the World Bank; director of the World Economic Forum Foundation; and president and rector of the U.N. University for Peace in Costa Rica where he was President of the Council. Later, Strong spent most of his time in the People's Republic of China. He was an active honorary professor at Peking University and Honorary Chairman of China's Environmental Foundation. He was also Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Institute for Research on Security and Sustainability for Northeast Asia. He had also presented stirring papers on the relation of poverty in developing countries to their population growth, particularly at the Symposium on Population Problems at the 1987 APS autumn meeting. Maurice Strong died November 28, 2015, at the age of 86. | |||