Sustainable Development Defined

Sustainable Development is a term used by its proponents to describe their recommended methods of creating economic growth which protect the environment, relieve poverty, and do not destroy natural capital in the short term at the expense of long term development.

Contents


* 1 Scope and definitions
* 2 Environmental Sustainability
* 3 Criticism of the term

Scope and definitions

While many definitions of the term have been introduced over the years, the most commonly cited definition comes from the report Our Common Future, more commonly known as the Brundtland Report, which states that sustainable development is development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

Sustainable development does not focus solely on environmental issues. More broadly, sustainable development policies encompass three general policy areas: economic, environmental and social. In support of this, several United Nations texts, most recently the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document, refer to the "interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars" of sustainable development as economic development, social development, and environmental protection.

The Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (UNESCO, 2001) elaborates further the concept by stating that "...cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature”; it becomes “one of the roots of development understood not simply in terms of economic growth, but also as a means to achieve a more satisfactory intellectual, emotional, moral and spiritual existence". In this vision, cultural diversity is the fourth policy area of sustainable development.

Some research activities start from this definition to show that the environment we inherited and that we will transmit to future generations is a combination of nature and culture. The Network of Excellence "Sustainable Development in a Diverse World" SUS.DIV, sponsored by the European Union, works in this direction. It integrates multidisciplinary capacities and interprets cultural diversity as a key element of a new strategy for sustainable development.

Sustainable development is a notoriously ambiguous concept, as a wide array of views have fallen under its umbrella. The concept has included notions of weak sustainability, strong sustainability and deep ecology. Different conceptions also reveal a strong tension between ecocentrism and anthropocentrism. Thus, the concept remains weakly defined and contains a large amount of debate as to its precise definition.

Environmental Sustainability

Main article: Environmental degradation

Environmental degradation is the damage to the biosphere as a whole due to human activity. Environmental degradation occurs when nature's resources (such as trees, habitat, earth, water and air) are being consumed faster than nature can replenish them, when pollution results in irreparable damage done to the environment or when human beings destroy or damage ecosystems in the process of development. Environmental degradation can take many forms including, but not limited to, desertification, deforestation, extinction and radioactivity. Some of the major causes of such degradation include: overpopulation, urban sprawl, industrial pollution, waste dumping, intensive farming, over fishing, industrialization, introduction of invasive species and a lack of environmental regulations.

The goal of environmental sustainability is to minimize these, and other causes, to halt and, ideally, reverse the processes they lead to.

An unsustainable situation occurs when natural capital (the sum total of nature's resources) is used up faster than it can be replenished. Sustainability requires that human activity, at a minimum, only uses nature's resources at a rate at which they can be replenished naturally:

Theoretically, the long term final result of environmental degradation would result in local environments that are no longer able to sustain human populations to any degree. Such degradation on a global scale would, of course, mean extinction for humanity.

In the short-term, environmental degradation leads to declining standards of living, the extinctions of large numbers of species, health problems in the human population, conflicts, sometimes violent, between groups fighting for a dwindling resource, water scarcity and many other major problems.
Consumption of renewable resources State of environment Sustainability
More than nature's ability to replenish Environmental degradation Not sustainable
Equal to nature's ability to replenish Environmental equilibrium Steady-state Sustainability
Less than nature's ability to replenish Environmental renewal Sustainable development

Criticism of the term

Many environmentalists have criticized the term "sustainable development" as an oxymoron, claiming that economic policies based around concepts of growth and continued depletion of resources cannot be sustainable, since that term implies resources remain constant. Resources such as petroleum are consumed much faster than they are created by natural processes, and are continually being depleted. It is argued that the term "sustainable development" is a term invented by business to show capitalism as ecologically friendly, thereby placating people promoting environmentalist values.

However, technologies such as renewable energy, recycling and the provision of services can, if carried out appropriately, provide for growth in the economic sense, either without the use of limited resources, or by using a relatively small amount of resources with a small impact. In the latter case, even the use of small amounts of resources may be unsustainable if continued indefinitely.



Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_development"