ABSTRACT
The idea of sustainable development has become a key concept for thinking about human futures. International agreement on the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 brought a formal commitment by national governments to the eradication of poverty, the protection of the global environment and the control of anthropogenic climate change. Yet human impacts on the biosphere continue to increase, and scientists warn of planetary environmental boundaries transgressed. We are said to live in a new geological era of the Anthropocene, shaped for the first time by human activities and transformations of the biosphere and not natural processes. The concept of ‘sustainable development’ links the global problems of poverty and environmental degradation, but it does not say how they are to be solved. Indeed, the term ‘sustainable development’ has a wide range of different meanings. Far from making the phrase useless, it is precisely its ability to frame divergent ideas about the future that has made sustainable development such a powerful and widely used term. Decisions about sustainability and development are profoundly political. At every step, choices have to be made. That is what this book is about.
