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Sus tainable development is most generally defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. However, the long history of this concept has embraced different definitions of both needs and development, making it a remarkably pliable term. This conceptual flexibility, coupled with new challenges raised by the analytical needs of those asking questions about the sustainability of particular development efforts, leaves those working in this area of inquiry with several difficult issues to resolve.

Origins

While the resource conservation ideas behind sustainable development can be traced back more than a century, the current focus on this concept coalesced in the 1960s around the work of scholars and researchers such as Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich. Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), while focused on the issue of toxic pesticides in the environment, highlighted the important connections between human well-being and the environment. Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1971) brought attention to the growth of the global population and the ways in which that population’s resource needs were leading to unsustainable uses of the environment. Perhaps most incendiary, though, was the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972), which took the messages of Carson, Ehrlich and others and predicted a bleak future for humanity if contemporary growth rates were not slowed. Each of these works focused on sustainability as it related to natural resources and the environment. The responses to these challenges, which included the United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 and the subsequent establishment of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), therefore tended to focus on the protection and preservation of the environment as a path to sustainability.

The publication of Our Common Future (1987), often called the Brundtland Report, reoriented the conversation about sustainability from an environment-first perspective to a more holistic perspective that considers social, cultural, economic, and environmental issues as highly interwoven. This change in the understanding of human-environment relations in the context of development was, at least in part, linked to ongoing development and aid efforts. For example, aid workers dealing with issues such as famine in the mid-1980s began to argue that society, perception, and knowledge had much more important roles in food outcomes than was previously imagined. In the case of the Ethiopian famine, many argued that food shortage was not a product of an absolute lack of food, but an outcome of particular networks of access and production, both of which related to social roles and status. From these concerns emerged efforts to understand the linkage among environment, development, and human wellbeing through livelihoods, especially sustainable livelihoods. Thus the Brundtland Report captured, at the broad policy level, the changing ideas of not only policymakers but also those working in and researching issues of sustainability on the ground.

The changing focus of sustainable development from an environment-led issue to one that embraced a wide range of issues culminated in the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), often called the Earth Summit. At this meeting, leaders of more than 100 nations agreed to a global action plan, called Agenda 21, to deal with linked issues of environment and development. The UN Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) was convened in the wake of this meeting to ensure appropriate follow-through on the Agenda 21 items. But even as “sustainable development” entered common parlance as an idea desirable to virtually everyone, it also regressed into a consideration of environmental issues as the driving force behind sustainability. For example, some of the focal outcomes of UNCED, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), were environment-first concerns that were posthoc linked to issues of human well being to suit the changing institutional goals of organizations such as UNEP. Thus, while environmental assessments became a common part of development planning in the 1990s, the linkage of environmental issues to development, or to wider social, economic, and political concerns within development remained poorly articulated and therefore a central problem for sustainable development.

Varieties of Expression

The popularity of the idea of sustainable development (in part a product of its flexibility), coupled with the lack of a commonly accepted, systematic means of linking the environment to development and human well-being, has created a situation in which the contemporary use of the term sustainable development encompasses a range of definitions, foci, and methods of evaluation. While the effort to broaden the definition of sustainable development by the Brundtland Commission was an important step in widening the conversation about sustainability, several constituencies have since tried to capture the concept of sustainable development for their own purposes.

For example, while some environmental groups insist on an environment-first approach to sustainable development, other business groups argue that development is what is to be sustained, even at an environmental cost, through mitigation efforts less costly than conservation efforts. Even when narrowed to those approaches that consider environmental conservation an important part of sustainable development, this concept is employed by a range of approaches to sustainability, including those anchored in environmental processes and indicators to complex systems approaches that attempt to evaluate linked human-environment systems.

What coherence the term sustainable development maintains in this intellectual context is drawn from the ways in which these approaches focus on two key points: the importance of environmental conservation and the idea of intergenerational equity. Some approaches to sustainable development continue the long tradition of focusing on the preservation of particular resources for future use. However, ongoing research into sustainability, especially in the human-environment foci of geography, anthropology, and economics, has illustrated the complexity of conserving even a single resource because of the ways in which these resources are parts of dynamic systems. Thus, sustainability has, for many in the contemporary literature, come to mean the preservation of dynamism in the system under investigation.

Ecosystem Focus

Efforts to understand systematic dynamism and preservation/conservation appear to be bringing us closer to a rigorous understanding of the relationship among development, human well-being, and the environment. For example, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), an effort to evaluate the sustainability of current human use of ecosystems, seeks to explicitly link environmental issues with economic, social and political issues through an understanding of the state and trends of the world’s ecosystems. Recognizing that the preservation of ecosystem function was a complex question, as one particular function of an ecosystem, such as the provisioning of food, might increase dramatically while another function, such as carbon sequestration, declines, the MA had to identify a means of capturing the dynamism of these ecosystems and the threats to that dynamics. The MA does this through ecosystem services, the goods and services ecosystems provide to human beings. This approach necessitated an understanding of consumption, the politics of conservation, and global political economy that shapes both the values human beings assign to ecosystems, and the patterns of environmental resource use these values would create in the future. In the Scenarios volume of Ecosystems and Human Well-Being, the MA presented evidence that current economic, social, and political trends in the use and management of ecosystems were leading to unsustainable degradation of these resources. This report thus reinforces the messages of sustainable development heard since the 1970s, but does so in a nuanced manner with a greater understanding of how environment, development, and human wellbeing are linked than in many previous reports of similar scope.

Fairness and Equity

The idea of preservation in sustainable development is usually justified through some idea of intergenerational fairness, where the current generation bears some responsibility for the condition of the earth, and therefore the quality of life, for future generations. This idea of fairness is often very general and does easily account for the tradeoffs inherent in conservation efforts. Natural systems change over time, and choosing to preserve such a system in its current state limits potential future uses of different states that the system might evolve into. Further, even in those approaches that seek a conservation of dynamism, the practical result of such efforts are policies targeted at a very few resources or processes, which means that other aspects of the system might be allowed to decline or degrade.

The fairness and equity issues embedded in the idea of sustainable development were given clear voice when, in 2000, the UN General Assembly passed the UN Millennium Declaration, in which the delegates laid out a set of global targets for development. These targets addressed both social and environmental issues. This declaration has since been condensed into eight major goals, called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs, while specifically targeting things like literacy and gender equality, also include ensuring environmental sustainability as the seventh goal.

In 2002 on the 10-year anniversary of the Earth Summit, the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) reaffirmed the global concern with issues of environment, society, and development, this time including concerns for globalization in the equation. The major outcome of the WSSD was a 64-page plan of implementation for the summit that addressed goals and targets for everything from water quality at the global scale to the different needs of particular regions.

Future Directions

As the establishment of clear connections among human well-being, development, and environment change became more pressing, the study of sustainable development has begun to develop a new approach and methods. This is the result of a pressure that has developed within sustainability studies as it becomes clear that existing efforts based upon conventional scientific inquiry cannot answer all of the questions raised by the issue of sustainable development.

One recent occurrence in sustainable development has been the emergence of sustainability science, an approach to the interconnections between nature and society focused on the identification and mitigation of vulnerability in human populations. As this vulnerability involves interlinked biophysical, social, and economic stresses that take on different organizations at different scales and have different impacts on various social actors, sustainability science has begun to focus on placeor regional-specific configurations of these stresses. Sustainability science acknowledges that conventional scientific approaches are often ill suited to the study and evaluation of sustainability, because sustainability is the end result of complex systems subject to nonlinear changes across varying time scales. As a result, this approach to sustainability seeks to integrate quantitative and qualitative data and case study methods to create sound understandings of the factors that influence sustainability. Recent efforts to put sustainability science into practice are expressed in Gerhard Petschel-Held et al.’s “syndromes of global change” approach.

Sustainable development remains a dynamic field with tremendous institutional support. Whether it can meet the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations rests upon not only how we define this term, but also on our ability to identify new methods and methodologies that better link the environment to development and human well-being, and through such linkages help us better understand and address the issues that sustainability raises.

Bibliography:

Steve Carpenter, Prabhu L. Pingali, Elena M. Bennett, and Monica B. Zurek, eds. Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Scenarios, vol. 2 (Island Press, 2006);
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962);
Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Ballantine Books, 1971);
Frank Ellis, Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries (Oxford University Press, 2000);
Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens, The Limits to Growth (Earth Island Limited, 1972);
Gerhard Petschel-Held et , “Syndromes of Global Change: A Qualitative Modelling Approach to Assist Global Environmental Management,” Environmental Modelling and Assessment (v.4, 1999);
World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford University Press, 1987).