ABSTRACT
The 1987 publication of the report by the United Nations Commission headed by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland proved to be a turning point in giving the word sustainability the meaning it now carries globally. The Brundtland Report firmly established the principle that the challenge to achieve sustainability involves an interplay between environmental and social factors. It coined the term ‘environmentally sustainable development’ (ESD) and defined this as development which ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs’.1 For people with a strong concern for protection of the world’s natural environment this seems like a rather human-centred definition of sustainability, however it introduced the innovative ‘intergenerational equity’ principle in order to encourage people to think more deeply about the possible future consequences of what they do in the present. The publication of the Brundtland Report reflected the fact that the UN had taken the lead in contemplating the global dimensions of the sustainability challenge ever since it held a landmark conference in Stockholm in 1972 on the ‘human environment’ which produced a statement with 26 principles for ensuring wise use of the world’s ‘natural resources’. The convening of the
Stockholm conference, in turn, reflected the steady growth of global awareness about global ‘limits’ which is often attributed to the fact that people living in the 1960s saw, for the first time, images of our rather lonely looking blue planet taken from circling spaceships. In 1970 an estimated 20 million people had turned out for ‘Earth Day’ rallies in the USA and the global environmental organisations Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace were formed in 1971 and 1972 respectively. A number of organisations began to use the word ‘sustainability’ during the 1970s; however the Brundtland Report must be given credit for making the word popular and for articulating its key implications. The Brundtland Report shone a spotlight on the intractable problem of global poverty because it stressed that poor people and poor communities are often most vulnerable to environmental hazards and, at the same time, they lack the resources to implement nature conservation strategies. It is hard to think about environmental well-being if you are desperate to access clean water, reliable supplies of food and adequate shelter. Furthermore, long-running regional and civil conflicts – often triggered by competition for resources – make it even harder. While poverty is worst in particular parts of the world, there are pockets of poverty and disadvantage in every country, and a strength of the Brundtland Report was that it demonstrated that global environmental sustainability is bound up with the need to radically reduce poverty and disadvantage. In the history of human thought the concept of sustainability, as we know it today, emerged and spread quickly and it is important to keep that in mind. This chapter will briefly review the history of that emergence before turning to efforts that have been made since 1987 to turn the emerging consciousness into global agreements for action. The chapter will focus on:
■ achievements and limitations of global action; ■ the prospects for building a new global movement for sustainability; and ■ efforts to build on principles articulated in the 1987 Brundtland Report
in order to develop a more comprehensive set of sustainability principles.
