University of Kiel, Ecology Centre, MSc Environmental Science, a seminar paper
1st version completed 10/15/2009 by Kevin Callon and Tomás Crisosto (kcallon@ucla.edu and tomascrisosto@hotmail.com)
2nd version (adapted, changes) 2010 by Tjede Nordhoff (Tjede@web.de)
Status: completed
Sustainable Development
Abstract
The concepts of sustainable development are widely used and not equal. The idea of sustainability was written down for the first time by a German captain for forests and it took a long time until it was defined by the Brundtland Commission in 1987 which is the most common definition. Mostly the basis of the concept consists of three so-called "dimensions of sustainability" - the environment, the economy and the society. All ideas about sustainable development contain the same elements: intra- and inter - generational justice, a global orientation, inter- and transdisciplinarity and participation. But the importance of the dimensions, the elements and some additional aspects are different. Also different aspects have to be kept in mind: natural resources are renewable or nonrenewable and the basis for human living, cultural values determine the behavior of societies, the consumption level and the population growth are playing an important role by reaching the goal of a sustainable development and at least policies and technologies can have a great influence on future developments.
Content
- Introduction
- History / development of the concept sustainable development
- The concept of sustainable development
- Natural resources: renewable and non renewable
- Cultural values and ethos
- Consumption level / population growth
- Policy
- Technology
- Case study - micro-gardens in Dakar
- References
- Useful literature and links
1. Introduction
Sustainability is the ability of something to endure over time. Although most commonly applied in the context of ecology, it is a term applicable to various objects and subjects in various contexts. As such, sustainability has become something of a buzzword, used by many people in many different settings, often laden with political agendas and mixed together with ideologies, and so it is useful to clarify what it is and what it entails. Essentially, the term asserts that there are certain practices which cannot continue indefinitely without destroying the conditions on which they depend, and that such practices are unsustainable. The inverse is those practices carried out in such a way that they can maintain themselves forever or at least for more than some generations. The sustainability principle is theoretically simply: withdrawal must be less than or at the very most equal to recharge.
The impact on the environment by anthropogenic activities such as resource exploitation and energy production has increased throughout recent history with advancements in technology and population growth. There is vast scientific evidence that humanity is on an unsustainable path.
In this wiki, we set out to disambiguate the concept, identify and explore its three interrelated ’pillars’ of environment, economy and society, and consider how such things as population growth, consumption levels, cultural values, political policy and the development of new technologies either contribute to or hinder the attainment of sustainability. At the end, a case study (micro-gardens in Dakar) is described.
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2. History / development of the concept sustainable development
The first note about sustainable development was publicized in 1713 in a work of a German captain named Carl von Carlowitz. He was a forester and his idea was that only a specific number of trees should be cut which can grow again. In the mid-twentieth century, environmental issues began attracting significant global attention because of different environmental problems like the acid rain and the dying of the forests or the smog in London or New York. In 1972, the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment became the first international conference about the environment. Besides that, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) was founded to act as the environmental conscience of the United Nations (UN) system. This served as a turning point in attitudes toward development with regard to environmental issues: whereas economic growth and global development had been considered by environmentalists as "suspect and inimical to sound and rational environmental management… a decade after Stockholm, development and environment were no longer seen as incompatible, and it was widely agreed that an assimilation of the aims of the two was needed to create a sustainable society" (McCormick 1989).
In 1980, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in cooperation with different UN organizations worked together on a World Conservation Strategy. In this work the term "sustainable development" was included for the first time.
In 1983, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) was founded to work out guidance and instructions to reach the goal of a sustainable development - fulfill the human basic needs considering the capacities of the environment.
In 1987, the publication of the WCED report entitled "Our Common Future" (Brundtland and Khalid 1987) gave a formal definition to sustainable development, which was to lay the groundwork for the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992:
"Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
During the Earth Summit, 178 countries committed themselves to the model of a sustainable development. Five documents were adopted:
- The Agenda 21 as an action program for sustainable development and to join the aims of developed and developing countries.
- The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development including the rights of development for today’s generation and for future generations.
- The Statement of Principles on Forests to manage the forests sustainably.
- The Framework Convention on Climate Change to stabilize the greenhouse gas concentrations.
- The Convention on Biological Diversity to protect the Biodiversity.
The definition of the WCED became the standard definition of sustainability. To fulfill the parameters it is thought that consideration needs to be given to all three of the so-called pillars of sustainability: environment, economy and society. Aspects of society may need to be restructured, reorganized or in some way modified in order to get humanity on a more sustainable path. Landscape architect and author Tom Turner (1998) outlines the needed changes as follows:
"The basic aim of sustainability planning is to reduce inputs to and waste from the human ecosystem. Wastes should be recycled, water returned to the ground, vegetation used for food and fuel, energy conserved, transport costs reduced. Nature should be revered – and conserved."
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3. The concept of sustainable development
All the different concepts of sustainability contain some basic elements: intra- and inter - generational justice, a global orientation, inter- and transdisciplinarity and participation.
As outlined in the definition of sustainable development, the "needs of the present" (intra - generational justice) and "the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (inter - generational justice) should be fulfilled ("meet").
The concepts have a global orientation because the goals of sustainable development can not be reached by one country and the problems do not affect one state (e.g. climate change, overfishing).
To solve these problems, it is necessary that scientist from different fields work together (interdisciplinarity) and also local people and "the not-scientific population" should be involved (participation / transdisciplinarity).
But still today, the concepts of sustainable development are discussed. The mainly used concept contains three dimensions (so-called three dimensional concept): The environment, the economy and the society - all dimensions are from the same importance.
The environment in this sense refers to the natural world in which humanity lives and whose resources it uses. Human beings, as all animals, are part of the Earth ecosystem and, accordingly, interact with it. The environment provides the fundaments for human life and activity, which then in turn change the environment in a circular chain of causality.
The economy, in a broad sense, comprises all the production, consumption and allocation of goods and services in the world. It consists of an exchange of money, labor and capital between producers and consumers. It is within the economy that people earn money with which to buy things they want and need. Market mechanisms, chiefly supply and demand, dictate what is produced and how much of it. The production process often has environmentally adverse side effects, such as CO2 emissions, and the products themselves, traded and ultimately consumed within an economy, are originally natural resources taken from the environment. Within a market economy, such as ours, economic incentives therefore directly influence anthropogenic activity on the environment. Furthermore, unless the market price of a product or service does not take into account the environmental costs which arise through its production (measurable via how much it would cost to clean up associated environmental harm, the monetary value a society places on that which is harmed, etc.) socially undesired environmental damage will occur.
Every society has needs and aspirations. There is variability among various societies, having as they do different cultures, but there are also basic necessities common to all people alive. Many needs, including the most fundamental ones, are completely reliant on the natural world in which societies build themselves. The services with which the environment provides society are often divided into three categories: provisioning, regulating and cultural. Provisioning services include material products taken from the natural world for human use, such as food for nourishment, fossilized carbon for fuel, timber for construction etc., all of them are finite at any one given time and many are nonrenewable. Regulating services include the byproducts of ecosystem functions from which humans benefit, such as air purification through photosynthesis or water purification in the soil. Cultural services are the least tangible and, likely, the most variable across societies. They include the nonmaterial benefits people obtain from their environment, be it spiritual enrichment, recreation, aesthetic pleasure, inspiration or the like. If a society’s environment is compromised, so will be its ability to meet these needs.
In short, without the environment there can be no economy and society’s needs cannot be fulfilled. As stated by English author Jonathan Porritt (2006),
"The economy is, in the first instance, a subsystem of human society ... which is itself, in the second instance, a subsystem of the totality of life on Earth (the biosphere). And no subsystem can expand beyond the capacity of the total system of which it is a part."
Figure 1 further illustrates the interconnectedness of environment, economy and society’s ability to achieve its aims. Resources are taken from the environment and put into the economy to supply human needs and desires. The consumption of said resources leads to waste, which may be recycled and then reused again as a resource. Recycling is, however, not always possible or carried out and indeed the recycling process itself may require use of natural resources, e.g. fuel. Waste is thus often reintroduced to the environment, whether buried in landfills, incinerated or otherwise disposed of. The environment’s natural capacity to assimilate waste takes care of some; however, the rest is not assimilated and instead threatens to contaminate, pollute or generally disturb the environment. This non-assimilated waste then adversely affects the economy that produced it.
Figure 1. There can be no economy without the environment
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4. Natural resources: renewable and non renewable
Natural resources can be distinguished as either renewable or non renewable, and the management approach suitable for each differs greatly. Exploitation of non renewable resources, such as fossil fuels or minerals, is necessarily unsustainable since consumption of them surpasses recharge, if indeed there is any recharge at all. The time frame needed to recover the pools of these resources is not in line with that of human life or, more specifically, consumption. Resources such as petroleum, which in fact will regenerate over thousands or millions of years, must therefore be treated as non renewable nonetheless.
In order to achieve the sustainability principle without drastically affecting living standards, the search for substitutes for non renewable resources has to be continued. Bio-combustibles, wind power, or solar power instead of fossil fuels are examples of possible, already conceived alternatives and can get us closer to reaching the sustainability principle. It has to be kept in mind, however, that albeit a step in the direction towards sustainability, these technologies also pollute and often require non renewable materials, e.g. steel for wind turbines.
Renewable resources, on the other hand, can be consumed sustainably, as long as consumption of them does not exceed their ability to regenerate, i.e. sustainable logging as opposed to clear cutting of whole forests. The objective of the person or group of people exploiting a renewable resource plays a large role in how they approach and handle the matter. In the illustrative case of fisheries, biologists and economists often fail to reach consensus regarding tolerable withdrawal levels, namely with a catchment of the fish stock usually in excess of the quota proposed by biologists (Foders 1994). The difficulty to properly manage fish stocks is variously attributed to such factors as the so-called tragedy of the commons, economic incentives that encourages fishermen to overexploit the seas, the difficulty of accounting for exact stock sizes, and so forth. When managing fisheries it is very important not to allow stocks to decrease beyond a threshold from behind which it is impossible for the population to recover.
Forestry management differs from that of fisheries. Silvicultural managed forests are grown in cohorts and their growth directly depends on time. There are many models for how to best manage forests sustainably depending on the objectives of the harvester, growth rates, the value of timber at certain ages, and other economic factors. Ecological factors should also be given consideration, such as biodiversity and nutrient loss and the resilience capacity of an ecosystem.
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5. Cultural values and ethos
The overarching cultural aspirations of a society greatly influence what the people within it do and how they go about achieving their cultural objectives. Human behavior can in this sense be seen, at least in part, as a result of the values its culture maintains. The presence of religion and tradition, for example, serve to cement a set of beliefs and practices within one culture over time, which may well differ from the beliefs and practices of another culture. There may be seen a spectrum of cultural values ranging from materialism at one end to asceticism at the other. A society with materialistic values is liable to consume more natural resources and thus impose a higher demand on the environment than a society leaning more towards ascetic values.
Western Society in particular embraces relatively materialistic ideals. Economic thought is dominated in the West by the paradigm of continued economic growth. As concisely summarized by UC Berkley economist Bradford Delong, "nothing matters more in the long run for the quality of life in an economy than its long-run economic growth" (DeLong and Olney 2005). However, this ideology draws much criticism for its environmental implications; for if exploitation of natural resources on which economic growth depends is done on an ever-increasing scale, it will eventually no longer be sustainable. Professor Michael Mayerfeld Bell (2004) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison warns:
"The pressure for economic growth tends to shift environmental considerations off our collective and individual agendas. Economic growth can take such a hold over our lives that issues of sustainability, environmental justice, and the rights and beauty of nature fade from concern."
There is further concern regarding the spread of the ideology of economic growth from the West outward on the coat tails of globalization. With increased ease of travel and heightened media transmission, such as, for instance, Hollywood films or advertising campaigns from foreign companies, there is an emergent homogenization of cultural ideals generally in favor of those from the West - a phenomenon also referred to as Americanization. In regard to developing nations, professor of economics and former Environment Minister of Indonesia Emil Salim (1996) states:
"The promotion of non-material development is what is needed and within that context religion and culture become important. It is for these reasons that I deliberately include social consideration as a part of sustainable development. The international movement towards materialistic development must be prevented, otherwise natural resources will be exhausted and the environment degraded."
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6. Consumption level / population growth
As human population rapidly grows to unprecedented numbers (see Figure 2), stress on the environment skyrockets as well. Every person on Earth is a consumer of its resources and, therefore, a greater population means greater consumption levels. On the other hand, however, consumption levels are not evenly distributed across lines of socioeconomic class. People in affluent countries - most notably in North America, Europe, Japan and Australia - consume very disproportionately in contrast to their poorer counterparts in less developed countries. 80% of the Earth’s resources are consumed by only 20% of its inhabitants, and if all people alive were to attain the living standards had by those in affluent countries, the resources of three planets would be needed (Houghton 2009). Ongoing population explosion exacerbates this fact tremendously. In addition to population numbers and consumption levels as related to affluence, there is a third component of consumption as well: impact per unit of resource use (largely correlated with technology used). Given these three components of consumption, environmental impact can be quantified vis-à-vis the following equation (Ehrlich and Holden 1974):
I = P × A × T
Where: I = Environmental impact, P = Population, A = Affluence, T = Technology
Sustainability requires that the value of I remain below the threshold of what the environment can endure.
Figure 1. Projected global population growth until 2050 (US Census Bureau 2008)
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7. Policy
Policies are a fundamental key towards sustainable development; they give rules to society, can promote environmentally friendly technology, and can change people’s behavior.
Tools such as Command and Control are established in all industrialized countries (Sprenger 1996), enabling the control of a numerical limit on the emissions of a particular pollutant from a particular point (command). This instrument can effectively control industries but often raises the production cost, discouraging productivity and thus economic activity. Costs associated with enforcement are also often high. Risk management and environmental impact assessment also give responsibilities to industries.
Another common way to incite the reduction of waste or pollution is through user and pollution charges, which affix monetary charges to the collection, transportation and disposal of waste, wastewater or other emissions. Charging for waste generation promotes recycling and reusing, thereby diminishing waste while also pushing the development of new technologies. For example, taxations such as the European parliament’s proposed "Polluter pays more" would incite the use of efficient transportation (European Parliament).
Emission trading, which sets a limit on allowed emission levels and allocates them to companies, is an economic technique praised by economists for its creation of a new sub-market that inspires constructive competition among firms to reduce emissions. A company that has not reached its emissions limit may sell the remainder to other companies and, inversely, companies that pollute beyond their allowed limit must either cease production or purchase additional emissions permits from other companies. Therefore those who can easily reduce emissions most cheaply will do so and pollution reduction is achieved at the lowest possible cost to society.
Subsidizing clean technology in order to reduce emissions and wastes are the side of the coin, used in order to promote sustainable development or to reduce the generation of emissions and wastes. For example, cars equipped with technology that considerably reduces emissions being free of taxes. Or subsidizing research related to clean technologies.
Political stability and trust constitute an important factor in regard to sustainability. When a country is unstable its capacity to control different industries and the processes involved is compromised. Investors may become afraid to invest in a particular region due to the risk associated with it, and if they do they will most probably try to get the highest profits in the shortest time possible, irrespective of the long-term environmental and social costs. Essentially, stability and trust allow people to plan and think in the long-term rather than merely the short-term.
The exchange of experience, knowledge and cooperation among different states is necessary to achieve sustainable development; otherwise tradable permits would not be efficient, the exploitation of resources such as fisheries will be subject to the tragedy of the commons, rivers that flow across borders will not be treated with adequate care, and so on.
The application, encouragement, and incentives of policies towards sustainable development comprise a task that should be made by local and national governments with permanent feedback from communities. Furthermore international agreements must be done in order to tackle global sustainability: it is not enough to be sustainable only locally.
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8. Technology
Advancements in technology particularly in the 20th Century have increased humanity’s control over the natural world exponentially. The exploitation of natural resources is both wider reaching and more intensive than ever before. Fossil fuel is extracted and used to power cars and planes across the globe; forests can be cleared quickly and easily; deeper sources of fresh water are most easily accessed; large fishing vessels catch fish in every corner of the globe; different agricultural techniques have greatly increased food production; and so on ad infinitum. But for all the comforts and luxuries these technologies afford us, they are also the cause of numerous environmental problems. City smog, contaminated drinking water and the depleted ozone layer are just three of innumerable examples of the ways in which technological advancements meant to better our lives have also inadvertently done the opposite.
On the other hand, so-called clean technologies help to mitigate or reduce impact had on the environment. Some examples: reduction of greenhouse gas emissions through more efficient engines, recycling and reusing raw materials, solar power, wind power, wave power, geothermal power, wastewater treatment facilities, etc. Different forms of these clean technologies are better suited for different places due to geographical or geological reasons. Iceland, to cite an extreme example, is able to generate nearly all of its electricity through geothermal energy and hydropower - two renewable sources. This certainly illustrates the potential clean technology carries.
However, there is reason for suspicion of new technologies supposed to save us from environmental peril. New pumping systems - "better technology" - have almost completely dried out Lake Chad in Western Africa. The development of new fishing techniques, bigger ships and better nets has led to overfishing worldwide (Frid et al. 2003). Technologies designed with the specific function of environment gentleness or repair may well prove better, one may argue. But the fact still remains that our present predicament is the result of unforeseen consequences of technologies that were also developed to improve human life.
In his bestselling book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, eminent scientist Jared Diamond bluntly asks, "what makes you think that, as of January 1, 2006, for the first time in human history, technology will miraculously stop causing new unanticipated problem while it just solves the problems that it previously produced?" (Diamond 2005).
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9. Case study: micro-gardens in Dakar
The Project "Micro-gardens in Dakar" started in 1999. The project has been implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Senegalese Government. In 2001, an extension to other regional capitals of Senegal was possible because of the Special Program for Food Security (SPFS) of the FAO. In the year 2004, the project became a program and the introduction of new technologies for horticulture in cities on roofs, in yards and in vacant places started. Another program with Milan (Italy) was signed in 2006 to consolidate the project.
In 2008, the project obtained the "International Award for Best Practices to Improve the Living Environment" from the United Arab Emirates and the United Nations Human Settlement Program.
In Dakar, the capital of Senegal the poverty rate is very high, there is an urban land pressure and the population is growing fast (2001: 24% of population on 3% of the territory). The aim of the project was to reduce unemployment and therewith poverty and to improve the food supply and nutrition for poor families with no access to farmland. For that reason, micro-gardens were implemented in yards, on roofs and in vacant places. Because of the urban land pressure, some micro-gardens were developed in some backyards of city halls, schools and hospitals. More than 4.000 families had been trained in micro-garden technology.
The achieved results with the program were:
- promotion of social justice (equal access to agricultural production)
- support of environmental education
- environmentally friendly: use of recycled material and drip irrigation
- generation of income by selling the surplus of vegetables / products
Knowing that more and more people will live in cities in the future, micro-gardens become of greater importance for all of us. Considering that our non renewable resources are getting fewer and the social injustice is growing it is important to strengthen the efforts to reach the goals of a sustainable development - especially if we want future generations to have the same possibilities than we had.
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References
- Bell, M. Mayerfeld (2004): An Invitation to Environmental Sociology 2nd Edition. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, p. 52.
- Brundtland, G.H. and Khalid, M. (1987): Our Common Future. Report of the world Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
- DeLong, Bradford & Olney, Martha (2005): Macroeconomics 2nd Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 8.
- Diamond, Jared (2005): Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, p. 505.
- Ehrlich, P.R. & Holden, J.P. (1974): Human Population and the Global Environment. American Scientist 62 (3).
- European Parliament, European Union, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/
- Foders, F. (1994): Reforming the European Union’s Common Fisheries Policy, Issues in Conservation and Policy Options. London: European Policy Forum.
- Frid, C., Hammer, C., Law, R., Loeng, H., Pawlak, J.F., Reid, P.C. & Tasker, M. (2003). Environmental Status of the European Seas. Copenhagen: ICES, Online. Available online: http://www.ices.dk/reports/germanqsr/23222_ICES_Report_samme.pdf (Last access: 8 April 2011).
- Houghton, John (2009): Global Warming: The Complete Briefing 4th Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge Press, p. 395-396.
- McCormick, John (1989). The Global Environmental Movement, London: Belhaven Press, p. 149.
- Porritt, J. (2006). Capitalism as if the World Mattered. London: Earthscan, p. 46.
- Salim, E. (1996). Towards Environmentally Sound, Sustainable Development. Global Environmental Security, Springer-Verlag: Berlin, p. 22-23.
- Sprenger, R. (1996), Global Environmental Security: Initiatives for Environmental Protection in Germany. Berlin: Springer, p. 148-163.
- Turner, Tom (1998). Landscape Planning and Environmental Impact Design 2nd Edition. London: UCL Press, p. 53-5.
- US Census Bureau (2008), http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldgrgraph.php
- WCED (1987). UN Documents Gathering a body of global agreements, Our Common Future, Chapter 2: Towards Sustainable Development, From A/42/427. Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, (Online, last access: 8 April 2011)
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Useful literature and links
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