Summit

I'm in New York this week for several meetings and a workshop in the margins of the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals.

This afternoon I was in a meeting to discuss preparations of a focus group for another summit in two years time, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+20 and scheduled to take place in May, 2012 in Brazil to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992.

And I was wondering if it's right to always use the word summit, each time people at the top of governments get together. Perhaps it would be more challenging and more motivating to talk of summits only on the occasions when they (and we) have all managed to climb to the top of a steep mountain.