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PART 1
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1
The Concept of Sustainable Development and its Practical Implications
Slobodan Perdan
Sustainable development is an approach to development which focuses on integrating economic activity with environmental protection and social concerns. This chapter describes the emergence of the concept of sustainable development as a response to destructive social and environmental effects of the prevailing approach to economic growth and discusses its practical implications. The chapter argues that the transition to a more sustainable society requires new ways of meeting our needs which can reduce the level of material consumption and reduce environmental damage without affecting quality of life. This will require, above all, limiting the throughput of materials and energy in the economy and finding less wasteful ways of meeting needs through increasing efficiency, reusing materials and using sustainable technologies. However, as the chapter points out, meeting the objective of sustainable development requires not only reducing the scale of polluting activities and excessive levels of consumption, but also calls for well-planned actions to alleviate poverty and achieve greater equity and distribution of opportunities both within and between countries.
1.1 Introduction
Around the world we see signs of severe stress on our interdependent economic, environmental and social systems. Population is growing ā it topped 6 billion in 2000, up from 4.4 billion in 1980, and it is expected to reach 8 billion by 2025 (UNCSD, 2002). Excessive consumption and poverty continue to put enormous pressure on the environment. In many areas, the state of the environment is much more fragile and degraded than it was a few decades ago. Despite notable improvements in areas such as river and air quality in places like Europe and North America, generally there has been a steady decline in the environment, especially across large parts of the developing world (UNEP, 2002, 2007).
There are some alarming trends underway. Most recent global environmental assessments (UNEP, 2002, 2007, 2009; MA, 2005; Solomon et al., 2007) put them into stark figures, characteristic examples of which include:
- Twenty per cent of Earthās land cover has been significantly degraded by human activity and 60% of the planetās ecosystems are now damaged or threatened (UNEP, 2009).
- Species are becoming extinct at rates which are a 100 times faster than the rate shown in the fossil record, because of land-use changes, habitat loss, overexploitation of resources, pollution and the spread of invasive alien species (MA, 2005; UNEP, 2007). Of the major vertebrate groups that have been comprehensively assessed, over 30% of amphibians, 23% of mammals and 12% of birds are threatened (UNEP, 2007).
- Concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main gas linked with global warming, currently stand at 386 parts per million, or more than 25% higher than in 150 years ago. Concentrations of other greenhouse gases, such as methane and halocarbons, have also risen (Solomon et al., 2007).
- Global average temperatures have risen by about 0.74 Ā°C since 1906, and the rise this century is projected to be between 1.8 and 4 Ā°C; some scientists believe a 2 Ā°C increase would be a threshold beyond which the threat of major and irreversible damage becomes more plausible (Solomon et al., 2007; UNEP, 2007).
- Available freshwater resources are declining: some 80 countries, amounting to 40% of the worldās population, are suffering serious water shortages; by 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in countries with absolute water scarcity (UNEP, 2007).
- Around half of the worldās rivers are seriously depleted and polluted (UNEP, 2002).
- More than 2 million people worldwide are estimated to die prematurely every year from indoor and outdoor air pollution (UNEP, 2007).
Other noteworthy trends include:
- Around 1.4 billion people are living in extreme poverty (measured as $1.25 a day) (UN, 2009);
- The number of hungry people worldwide grew to 963 million, or about 14.6% of the world population of 6.6 billion, representing an increase of 142 million over the figure for 1990ā1992 (FAO, 2009);
- More than 100 million primary school age children remain out of school (UN, 2009);
- Around 1.1 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water and an estimated 2.6 billion people today lack improved sanitation facilities (UNEP, 2007);
- Poverty claims the lives of 25 000 children each day (UNICEF, 2000).
These and a host of other trends suggest that our current development course is unsustainable. The high and increasing consumption of scarce resources, the resulting pollution compounded by population growth and the growing imbalance in development between different countries pose unacceptable risks to communities, nations and humanity as a whole. It has become clear that economic development that disregards environmental and social impacts can bring unintended and unwanted consequences, as evidenced by the threat of climate change, overuse of freshwater resources, loss of biological diversity and raising inequalities.
The concept of sustainable development has grown out of concerns about these adverse trends. In essence, it is an approach to development which focuses on integrating economic activity with environmental protection and social concerns.
1.2 Development of the Concept
The concept of sustainable development as we know it today emerged in the 1980s as a response to the destructive social and environmental effects of the prevailing approach to āeconomic growthā.
The idea originated within the environmental movement. One of the earliest formulations of the concept of sustainable development can be found in the 1980ās World Conservation Strategy jointly presented by the UN Environment Programme, the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN/UNEP/WWF, 1980). This early formulation emphasized that:
For development to be sustainable, it must take account of social and ecological factors, as well as economic ones; of the living and non-living resource base; and of the long-term as well as the short-term advantages and disadvantages of alternative actions.
It called for three priorities to be built into development policies: the maintenance of ecological processes; the sustainable use of resources; and the maintenance of genetic diversity.
However, the concept of sustainable development gained a wider recognition only after the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) published its report āOur common futureā (also known as āthe Brundtland Reportā) in 1987. It was this report that gave the concept the prominence it has today.
The WCED report set the benchmark for all future discussions on sustainable development. The starting point for the commissionās work was their acknowledgement that the future of humanity is threatened. āOur common futureā (WCED, 1987) opened by declaring:
The Earth is one but the world is not. We all depend on one biosphere for sustaining our lives. Yet each community, each country, strives for survival and prosperity with little regard for its impacts on others. Some consume the Earthās resources at a rate that would leave little for future generations. Others, many more in number, consume far too little and live with the prospects of hunger, squalor, disease, and early death.
To confront the challenges of overconsumption on the one hand and grinding poverty on the other hand, the commission called for sustainable development, defined as ādevelopment that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needsā.
In order to reverse unsustainable trends the WCED recommended the following seven critical actions aimed at ensuring a good quality of life for people around the world (WCED, 1987):
- revive growth;
- change the quality of growth;
- meet essential needs and aspirations for jobs, food, energy, water and sanitation;
- ensure a sustainable level of population;
- conserve and enhance the resource base;
- reorient technology and manage risk; and
- include and combine environment and economics considerations in decision-making.
Since the Brundtland Report, a whole series of events and initiatives have brought us to the wide-ranging interpretation of sustainable development that we see today. One of the key events was, undoubtedly, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, more informally known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. At the Earth Summit, representatives of nearly 180 countries endorsed the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development which set out 27 principles supporting sustainable development. The assembled leaders also signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Forest Principles. They also agreed a global plan of action, Agenda 21, designed to deliver a more sustainable pattern of development, and recommended that all countries should produce national sustainable development strategies.
Ten years later, in September 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, leaders and representatives of 183 countries reaffirmed sustainable development as a central element of the international agenda. The present governments agreed to a wide range of concrete commitments...
