Introduction to Sustainable Development

  Critical Actions

Around the world we see signs of severe stress on our interlocked global economic, environmental and social systems. As the United Nations Environmental Programme's GEO-2000 report points out, the "time for a rational, well-planned transition to a sustainable system is running out fast." ¹ And yet we continue to adopt a business-as-usual approach to decision-making, which increases the chance that our global systems will crack and begin to crumble. Already we are faced with full-scale emergencies through freshwater shortages, tropical forest destruction, species extinction, urban air pollution, and climate change.

How do we quickly reverse these trends? In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development recommended seven critical actions needed to ensure a good quality of life for people around the world:

• Revive growth
• Change the quality of growth
• Meet essential needs and aspirations for jobs, food, energy, water and sanitation
• Ensure a sustainable level of population
• Conserve and enhance the resource base
• Reorient technology and manage risk
• Include and combine environment and economics considerations in decision-making

These recommendations are as valid today as they were when first written. They are a call to change our actions and to do things differently. In particular, they underscore a need to:

• Produce differently - apply concepts of eco-efficiency and sustainable livelihoods
• Consume differently
• Organize ourselves differently - increase public participation while reducing corruption and perverse subsidies

When taken together, these actions can help orient us on a path toward sustainable development.

1. United Nations Under-Secretary General and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). "Overview: Outlook and recommendations," Global Environment Outlook 2000, London: Earthscan, 1999. Also: http://grid.cr.usgs.gov/geo2000/ov-e/0012.htm