Remembering the Magna Carta on Human Environment

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 21 Jul 2025

Anthony Judge | Laetus in Praesens - TRANSCEND Media Service

Use of AI to develop mnemonic aids to comprehension of complex strategic articulations.

Introduction

18 Jul 2025 – The thematic articulation of most fundamental strategies is completely unmemorable to most: Universal Declaration of Human Rights (30); Sustainable Development Goals (17), Magna Carta on Human Environment (26). This is especially the case with regard to the systemic feedback loops implied by each set of articles. There are many such strategic documents — many already forgotten and all readily forgettable, as reviewed separately (Configuring Multiple Disparate Sets of Strategic Principles, 2025).

One simple approach for mnemonic purposes is to associate a letter of the alphabet with each article, as particularly suggested by the case of the 26 principles in the foundational Stockholm Declaration of 1972. Groups of letters could then be formed into words as an indicator of the systemic links between the themes of individual articles. Of interest in this respect is to take advantage of the skills of AI in formulating such clues to remembrance — an exercise easily repeated with various strategic declarations and with various AIs. In the following exercise, the challenge was presented to the DeepSeek AI for the case of the Magna Carta on Human Environment — otherwise variously confused as the Stockholm Declaration.

The Magna Carta on Human Environment (Malta, 2017), or “Malta Declaration”, draws directly from the 26 principles articulated in the Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm, 1972) . The latter is widely regarded as the global Magna Carta for environmental rights — and is occasionally heralded in legal scholarship as the “Magna Carta on Human Environment”. It set the framework for later articulations such as the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (1992). It also created the framework for later national initiatives (such as Malta’s constitutional reforms) seeking to realize and enforce its principles domestically and internationally. Such documents express the right to a healthy environment as fundamental, and Malta’s later actions are a continuation and local implementation of the vision established in 1972. Reference is also made to a distinct Malta Declaration by the members of the European Council on the external aspects of migration: addressing the Central Mediterranean route (February 2017).

• The Stockholm Declaration (1972)
  • The Stockholm Declaration was the first major international statement on environmental rights and responsibilities, adopted at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm, Sweden, in June 1972.
  • It set out 26 principles recognizing the fundamental right to a healthy environment and established the foundational ideas for international environmental law.
  • The Declaration is often referred to as the “Magna Carta” of global environmental rights because it marked the start of modern international environmental governance and called for global cooperation and sustainable management of natural resources.
• The Magna Carta on Human Environment (Malta, 2017)
  • The “Magna Carta on Human Environment” referenced in relation to Malta, 2017, is not a standalone international treaty but generally reflects ongoing recognition and reinforcement of the principles established in the Stockholm Declaration.
  • Malta, like many other countries, continued to promote and strengthen national and international laws, policies, and constitutional principles rooted in the 1972 Declaration, highlighting the human right to a healthy environment.

The following reproduction of the engagement with DeepSeek includes both the unedited preliminary “internal” reflections (“Chain of Thought“) of the AI and the final considered response. This could be considered valuable to understanding the issues meriting consideration prior to the formulation of any response — even if the exercise is undertaken without AI assistance. The questions could have been framed otherwise to focus to a far greater extent on the memorability of the systemic links between article themes of relevance to policy makers — through use of mnemonic words and phrases. The exercise can of course be repeated with other AIs for comparative purposes.

The exercise was then repeated with ChatGPT, using more policy-oriented prompts for the case of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals — a late transmogrification of the Stockholm Declaration. The purpose was to explore possibilities of rendering more widely memorable both those goals and the systemic linkages between them as being vital to their sustainability. Such exercises frame the question as to whether strategies indeed lend themselves to meaningful sonification (A Singable Earth Charter, EU Constitution or Global Ethic? 2006). Significant in that respect is the initiative of Franz Josef Radermacher of the Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing (FAW, Ulm) in association with the Global Marshall Plan Initiative (12 songs of The Globalization Saga: Balance or Destruction, 2004).

Given the major challenge of human rights, it might well be asked why there are no such aids to the memorability of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) and the interlinkages between its 30 themes. Given the potential correspondence between the 26 principles of the Magna Carta on the Human Environment and the 26 principles of governance articulated by Ray Ison and Ed Straw (The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking:: governance in a climate emergency, 2020), the method could well be explored in the latter case. The distinctive sets of 26-fold principles have been experimentally mapped onto polyhedra with AI assistance in a separate approach to memorabilty (Mapping of a 26-fold framework of strategic relevance, 2025).

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