Sustainable development

Definition

In 1987, the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development released the report Our Common Future, commonly called the Brundtland Report. The report included a definition of “sustainable development”. Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains two key concepts within it.

The concept of ‘needs’, in particular, the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and

The idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.

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Sustainability

Sustainability is a societal goal that broadly aims for humans to safely co-exist on planet Earth over a long time. Specific definitions of sustainability are difficult to agree on and therefore vary in the literature and over time. The concept of sustainability can be used to guide decisions at the global, national and individual level (e.g. sustainable living). Sustainability is commonly described along the lines of three dimensions (also called pillars): environmental, economic and social. Many publications state that the environmental dimension (also referred to as “planetary integrity” or “ecological integrity”) should be regarded as the most important one. Accordingly, in everyday usage of the term, sustainability is often focused on the environmental aspects. The most dominant environmental issues since around 2000 have been climate change, loss of biodiversity, loss of ecosystem services, land degradation, and air and water pollution. Humanity is now exceeding several “planetary boundaries” Sustainable development, like sustainability, is regarded to have three dimensions (also called pillars, domains, aspects, spheres and globalized etc.): the environment, economy and society.

“Wedding cake” model for the sustainable development goals, which is similar to the nested circle diagram, whereby the environmental dimension or system is the basis for the other two dimensions.

Three different areas of sustainability are normally distinguished: the environmental, the social, and the economic. Several terms are in use for this concept in the literature: authors speak of three pillars, dimensions, components, aspects, perspectives, factors or goals, and all mean the same thing in this context. The emergence of the three dimensions paradigm has little theoretical foundation but gradually emerged without a single point of origin. Nevertheless, the distinction itself is rarely questioned, and the “three dimension” conception of sustainability is a dominant interpretation within the literature.

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Sustainable development

Sustainable development