Sustainable Development

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Considering that the concept of sustainable development is now enshrined on the masthead of Environment magazine, featured on 8,720,000 Web pages and enmeshed in the aspirations of countless programs, places, and institutions, it should be easy to complete the sentence.

The most widely accepted definition is creatively ambiguous : “Humanity has the ability to make devel­opment sustainable—to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

This malleabil­ity allows programs of environment or development; places from local to global; and institutions of government, civil soci­ety, business, and industry to each project their interests, hopes and aspirations onto the banner of sustainable development.

A brief history of the concept, along with the interpretive differences and the common ground in definitions, goals, indicators, values, and practice follows. Taken together, these help explain what is meant by sustainable development.

BACKGROUND

In the last half of the twentieth century, four key themes emerged from the col­lective concerns and aspirations of the world’s peoples: peace, freedom, devel­opment, and environment. The peace that was thought to be secured in the postwar world of 1945 was immedi­ately threatened by the nuclear arms race. Throughout the Cold War, peace was sus­tained globally but fought locally, often by proxies for the superpowers. While the number of wars has diminished over the last decade, peace is still sought, pri­marily in Africa and the Middle East.

Freedom was sought early in the post-war world in the struggle to end imperi­alism; to halt totalitarian oppression and later to extend democratic governance, human rights, and the rights of women, indigenous peoples, and minorities. The success of many former colonies in attain­ing national independence was followed by a focus on economic development to provide basic necessities for the poor­est two-thirds of the world and higher standards of living for the wealthy third. Finally, it is only in the past 40 years that the environment (local to global) became a key focus of national and international law and institutions.

Although reinterpreted over time, peace, freedom, development, and the environment remain prominent issues and aspirations. In the 1970s and 1980s, world commissions of notables were created to study such international con­cerns, producing major documents that were often followed by global confer­ences. Characteristic of these interna­tional commissions was the effort to link together the aspirations of human­kind—demonstrating how the pursuit of one great value required the others. Sustainable development, with its dual emphasis on the most recent concerns—development and environment—is typi­cal of such efforts.

The World Commission on Environ­ment and Development was initiated by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1982, and its report, Our Com­mon Future, was published in 1987. It was chaired by then–Prime Minister of Norway Gro Harlem Brundtland, thus earning the name the “Brundtland Com­mission.” The commission’s member­ship was split between developed and developing countries. Its roots were in the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment—where the con­flicts between environment and devel­opment were first acknowledged—and in the 1980 World Conservation Strat­egy of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which argued for conservation as a means to assist development and specifically for the sustainable development and utilization of species, ecosystems, and resources. Drawing on these, the Brundtland Com­mission began its work committed to the unity of environment and development.

As Brundtland argued:

The environment does not exist as a sphere separate from human actions, ambitions, and needs and attempts to defend it in isolation from human concerns have given the very word “environment” a connotation of naivety in some political circles. The word “development” has also been narrowed by some into a very lim­ited focus, along the lines of “what poor nations should do to become richer,” and thus again is automatically dismissed by many in the international arena as being a concern of specialists, of those involved in questions of “development assistance.” But the “environment” is where we live; and “development” is what we all do in attempting to improve our lot within that abode. The two are inseparable.

As with previous efforts, major international meetings followed the report. The United Nations Confer­ence on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (the so-called “Earth Summit”) issued a dec­laration of principles, a detailed Agen­da 21 of desired actions, international agreements on climate change and biodi­versity, and a statement of principles on forests. Ten years later, in 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable Develop­ment in Johannesburg, South Africa, the commitment to sustainable development was reaffirmed. In the interim, sustain­able development as a concept, as a goal, and as a movement spread rapidly and is now central to the mission of count­less international organizations, national institutions, corporate enterprises, “sus­tainable cities,” and locales.

DEFINITIONS

The Brundtland Commission’s brief definition of sustainable development is the “ability to make development sustain­able—to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” is surely the standard defi­nition when judged by its widespread use and frequency of citation. The use of this definition has led many to see sustainable development as having a major focus on intergenerational equity. Although the brief definition does not explicitly men­tion the environment or development, the subsequent paragraphs, while rarely quoted, are clear. On development, the report states that human needs are basic and essential; that economic growth—but also equity to share resources with the poor—is required to sustain them; and that equity is encouraged by effec­tive citizen participation. On the environ­ment, the text is also clear:

The concept of sustainable development does imply limits—not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities.

In the years following the Brundtland Commission’s report, the creative ambi­guity of the standard definition, while allowing a range of disparate groups to assemble under the sustainable devel­opment tent, also created a veritable industry of deciphering and advocat­ing what sustainable development really means. One important study—by the Board on Sustainable Development of the U.S. National Academy of Scienc­es—sought to bring some order to the broad literature its members reviewed. In its report, Our Common Journey: a Transition toward Sustainability, the board focused on the seemingly inher­ent distinction between what advocates and analysts sought to sustain and what they sought to develop, the relationship between the two, and the time horizon of the future.

Thus under the heading “what is to be sustained,” the board identified three major categories—nature, life support systems, and community—as well as intermediate categories for each, such as Earth, environment, and cultures. Drawing from the surveyed literature, the board found that most commonly, emphasis was placed on life support systems, which defined nature or envi­ronment as a source of services for the utilitarian life support of humankind. The study of ecosystem services has strengthened this definition over time. In contrast, some of the sustainable development literature valued nature for its intrinsic value rather than its utility for human beings. There were also parallel demands to sustain cultural diversity, including livelihoods, groups, and places that constitute distinctive and threatened communities.

Similarly, there were three quite dis­tinct ideas about what should be devel­oped: people, economy, and society. Much of the early literature focused on economic development, with pro­ductive sectors providing employment, desired consumption, and wealth. More recently, attention has shifted to human development, including an emphasis on values and goals, such as increased life expectancy, education, equity, and opportunity. Finally, the Board on Sus­tainable Development also identified calls to develop society that emphasized the values of security and well-being of national states, regions, and institutions as well as the social capital of relation­ships and community ties.

There was ready agreement in the literature that sustainable development implies linking what is to be sustained with what is to be developed, but here, too, the emphasis has often differed from extremes of “sustain only” to “develop mostly” to various forms of “and/or.” Similarly, the time period of concern, ambiguously described in the standard definition as “now and in the future,” has differed widely. It has been defined from as little as a generation—when almost everything is sustainable—to forever—when surely nothing is sustainable.

The 2002 World Summit on Sustain­able Development marked a further expansion of the standard definition with the widely used three pillars of sustainable development: economic, social, and environmental. The Johan­nesburg Declaration created “a col­lective responsibility to advance and strengthen the interdependent and mutu­ally reinforcing pillars of sustainable development—economic development, social development and environmental protection—at local, national, regional and global levels.” In so doing, the World Summit addressed a running con­cern over the limits of the framework of environment and development, wherein development was widely viewed solely as economic development. For many under the common tent of sustainable development, such a narrow defini­tion obscured their concerns for human development, equity, and social justice.

Thus while the three pillars were rap­idly adopted, there was no universal agreement as to their details. A Web search of the phrase “three pillars of sustainable development” finds a wide variety of environmental, economic, and social pillars with differences most pronounced in characterizing the social pillar. Three major variants of social development are found, each of which seeks to compensate for elements miss­ing in the narrow focus on econom­ic development. The first is simply a generic non-economic social designation that uses terms such as “social,” “social development,” and “social progress.” The second emphasizes human develop­ment as opposed to economic develop­ment: “human development,” “human well-being,” or just “people.” The third variant focuses on issues of justice and equity: “social justice,’’ “equity,” and “poverty alleviation.”

GOALS

Another way to define sustainable development is in what it specifically seeks to achieve. To illustrate, it is help­ful to examine three sets of goals that use different time-horizons: the short-term (2015) goals of the Millennium Decla­ration of the United Nations; the two-generation goals (2050) of the Sustain­ability Transition of the Board on Sus­tainable Development; and the long-term (beyond 2050) goals of the Great Transi­tion of the Global Scenario Group.

UN Millennium Declaration

To mark the millennium, heads of state gathered in New York at the United Nations in September 2000. There, the UN General Assembly adopted some 60 goals regarding peace; development; environment; human rights; the vulner­able, hungry, and poor; Africa; and the United Nations. Many of these con­tained specific targets, such as cutting poverty in half or insuring universal primary school education by 2015. For eight of the major goals, progress is monitored by international agencies. In 2004, these agencies concluded that at existing rates of progress, many countries will fall short of these goals, particularly in Africa. Yet the goals still seemed attainable by collective action by the world community and national governments. To do so, the Millenni-um Project, commissioned by the UN secretary-general, recently estimated that the additional financial resources that would be required to meet the Millennium Development Goals are $135 billion in 2006, rising to $195 billion in 2015. This roughly represents a doubling of official aid flows over current levels and is still below the UN goal of aid flows from industrialized to developing countries of 0.7 percent of the gross national product for industri­alized countries.

Sustainability Transition of the Board on Sustainable Development

In 1995, the Board on Sustainable Development of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences sought to make sustainable development more mean­ingful to scientific analysis and contri­butions. To do so, the board decided to focus on a two-generation time horizon and to address the needs of a global population with half as many more people as there are today—needs that, if met successfully, are not likely to be repeated within the next century or two because of the demographic tran­sition. In that time period, the board suggested that a minimal sustainability transition would be one in which the world provides the energy, materials, and information to feed, nurture, house, educate, and employ the many more people of 2050—while reducing hun­ger and poverty and preserving the basic life support systems of the planet. To identify more specific goals, of meeting human needs, reducing hunger and poverty, and preserving the basic life support systems of the planet, the board searched the text and statements from recent global conferences, world summits, international environmental treaties, and assessments. In so doing, the board in 1995 anticipated the 2000 Millennium Declaration goals, many of which were incorporated into its analy­sis of goals and targets. Less sanguine than the UN, the board determined it would take a generation to reach the 2015 goals of the Millennium Declara­tion and another generation to achieve the board’s goals of meeting human needs for a 2050 population.

Great Transition of the Global Scenario Group

With the assistance of the Global Scenario Group, the Board on Sustain­able Development conducted a scenario analysis of a proposed “Sustainability Transition,” focusing specifically on hunger and the emission of greenhouse gasses. This initial analysis served as the subsequent basis of the Policy Reform Scenario of the Global Scenario Group and concluded that a sustainability tran­sition is possible without positing either a social revolution or a technological miracle. But it is “just” possible, and the technological and social requirements to move from business as usual—without changing lifestyles, values, or econom­ic system—is daunting. Most daunting of all is the governmental commitment required to achieve it and the political will to do so.

Finally, the Global Scenario Group also prepared a more idealistic Great Transition Scenario that not only achieved the goals of the sustainability transition outlined by the Board on Sus­tainable Development but went further to achieve for all humankind “a rich quality of life, strong human ties and a resonant connection to nature.” In such a world, it would be the quality of human knowledge, creativity, and self-realiza­tion that represents development, not the quantity of goods and services. A key to such a future is the rejection of material consumption beyond what is needed for fulfillment or for a “good life.” Beyond these goals, however, the details of this good life are poorly described.