General of the United Nations Organization. 40. Governments at the UN General Assembly should therefore take the necessary measures to reinforce the system-wide responsibility and authority of the UN Secretary-General concerning interagency coordination and cooperation generally, and for achieving sustainable development specifically. This will require that the representatives of those same governments in the governing bodies of all major UN organizations and specialized agencies take complementary measures. This could be done as an integral part of the parallel resolutions just proposed on building sustainable development objectives and criteria into the mandates, programmes, and budget of each agency 41. To help launch and guide the interagency coordination and cooperation that will be needed, the UN Secretary-General should constitute under his chairmanship a special UN Board for Sustainable Development. The principal function of the Board would be to agree on combined tasks to be undertaken by the agencies to deal effectively with the many critical issues of sustainable development that cut across agency and national boundaries.
2. Dealing With the Effects 42. Governments should also strengthen the role and capacity of existing environmental protection and resource management agencies./12
2.1 National Environmental Protection and Natural Resources Management Agencies 43. Strengthening of environmental agencies is needed most urgently in developing countries. Those that have not established such agencies should do so as a matter of priority. In both cases, bilateral and multilateral organizations must be prepared to provide increased assistance for institutional development. Some of this increased financial support should go to community groups and NGOs, which are rapidly emerging as important and cost-effective partners in work to protect and improve the environment locally and nationally, and in developing and implementing national conservation strategies. 44. Industrialized countries also need greatly strengthened environmental protection and resource management agencies. Most face a continuing backlog of pollution problems and a growing range of environment and resource management problems too. In addition, these agencies will be called upon to advise and assist central economic and sectoral agencies he they take up their new responsibilities for sustainable development. Many now provide institutional support, technical advice, and assistance to their counterpart agencies in developing countries, and this need will grow. And, almost inevitably, they will play a larger and more direct role in international cooperation, working with other countries and international agencies trying to cope with regional and global environmental problems.
2.2 Strengthen the United Nations Environment Programme 45. When UNEP was established in 1972, the UN General Assembly gave it a broad and challenging mandate to stimulate, coordinate, and provide policy guidance for environmental action throughout the UN system./13 That mandate was to be carried out by a Governing Council of 58 member states, a high-level UN interagency Environment Coordination Board (ECB),/14 a relatively small secretariat located in Nairobi, and a voluntary fund set initially at a