SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

A Brief History of Sustainable Development

The Sustainability Reporting Program works from a definition of sustainability that sees human activities as part of and dependent upon the natural world. In Scientific terms, the human ecosystem, including the communities we build, is a subset of the larger ecosystem of the Earth.

Sustainability is about meeting basic human needs and wants. People value their health and that of their children, economic security and happiness. These are primary elements in our quality of life.

Most definitions stress that sustainability requires making decisions that recognize the connections between actions and effects in the environment, economy and society. Sustainability is very much about what kind of a legacy we want to leave for our children and grandchildren.

The sustainability idea as we know it emerged in a series of meetings and reports during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972, the UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment marked the first great international meeting on how human activities were harming the environment and putting humans at risk.

The 1980 World Conservation Strategy, prepared by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature along with the UN Environment Program and the World Wildlife Fund, promoted the idea of environmental protection in the self-interest of the human species.

In 1987, the UN- sponsored Brundtland Commission released Our Common Future, a report that captured widespread concerns about the environment and poverty in many parts of the world.

The Brundtland report said that economic development cannot stop, but it must change course to fit within the planet’s ecological limits. It also popularized the term sustainable development, which it defined as development that meets present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

World attention on sustainability peaked at the 1992 UN conference on Environment and Development, in Rio de Janeiro. It brought together the heads or senior officials of 179 governments, and included the Earth Summit, the largest-ever meeting of world leaders. Rio produced tow international agreements, two statements of principles and a major action agenda on worldwide sustainable development.

The interest in sustainability that flourished during that period was spurred by a series of incidents and discoveries, including the leak of poisonous gas from a chemical plant at Bhopal, India, the explosion and radioactive release from Chernobyl!. Ukraine, the hole in the Antarctic ozone layer, leaking toxic chemical dumps, such as Love Canal, general fears about chemical contamination and conflicts over decreasing natural resources such as forests and fisheries.

The Brundtland report captured many of those concerns when it said:

“Major, unintended changes are occurring in the atmosphere, in soils, in waters, among plants and animals. Nature is bountiful but it is also fragile and finely balanced. There are thresholds that cannot be crossed without endangering the basic integrity of the system. They we are close to many of those thresholds.”