World leaders are being criticised for failing to find concrete solutions to escalating environmental crises, following the closing of the Rio+20 Earth Summit.
Over 100 representatives from 188 countries gathered in Rio for the Earth Summit over the last two days, making it the biggest UN conference ever held.
The countries who joined the summit have made commitments to make global growth sustainable by 2015, with goals including tackling poverty and protecting the environment.
"Rio+20 is about implementation, about action, it is about concrete action," said the summit's secretary general Sha Zukang.
But environmentalists like Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo say the summit concluded with a lack of firm financial commitments and specific targets.
"We are playing political poker with the future of our planet by not acting with the urgency that the situation calls for," Naidoo said.
New Zealand's Environment Minister Amy Adams says there has been progress made, albeit it "modest".
"I don't want to oversell it, but you can't escape the fact that we have made some gains in areas that certainly are important to New Zealand," Adams said.
"I'll be absolutely upfront that New Zealand doesn't claim to have solved all the problems ... but I think the thing you can't escape is that actually we have made incredible progress," she said.
Adams' claim is one that makes celebrity activist Lucy Lawless balk.
"She blew my mind when she said that ... we have a woeful recent history and that is at odds with how we see ourselves," Lawless said.
On Yale University's environmental index New Zealand has plummeted from first place to 14th, over the last six years.
Catch the full interviews with Lucy Lawless and Amy
Adams on
Q+A
on TV ONE tomorrow morning from 9am.