Sustainable Development

The term sustainable development came into use after the publication of the Brundtland Commission's report “Our Common Future” in 1987. Officially named the World Commission on Environment and Development, this panel of experts from different countries was chaired by G. H. Brundtland, and had been given the task in 1983 by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly of defining a new type of global development that reconciled environment and development in both the north and the south. Its famous report paved the way for the major UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992), also referred to as the Earth Summit. The Rio Conference was convened 20 years after the UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE, in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972) and 10 years before the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD, in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002). These milestones in the UN sphere have strongly influenced the way that environmental concepts and policies have gradually been integrated into development issues, thereby drawing the contours of a sustainable development perspective.

For years, the overwhelming majority of countries have had sustainable development strategies, developed on a national, state, or local level, or by various public and private institutions, including corporations. At the start of the 21st century, while the idea of sustainable development appears to have broad support, there is much less clarity about either its precise meaning or which steps to take toward its implementation.

More than 30 years after its publication, the Brundtland Report's definition of sustainable development—“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”—remains by far the most cited. Two key concepts in sustainable development, according to the reports, are

Needs, and in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and

Limitations and particularly those imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs.

Broadly defined, an environmental or ecological approach to sustainability tends to stress ecological constraints, or the carrying capacity of a territory, prior to allowing the expansion of development. In the Strategy for Sustainable Living, endorsed in 1991 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), sustainable development is basically defined as “improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems.” The approach taken by most economists, in contrast, focuses on what is necessary to assure further development. A typical expression of this view comes from the economist D. W. Pearce, when he wrote that “sustainable development is readily interpretable as non declining human welfare over time—that is, a development path that makes people better off today but makes people tomorrow have a lower 'standard of living' is not 'sustainable.'”

The Three Dimensions of Sustainable Development

One increasingly predominant notion of sustainable development originated in the mid-1990s from the world of business, and is ...