The most quoted definition of Sustainable Development comes from 1987's United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development report "Our Common Future" (commonly named the "Brundtland Report"), popularized at the 1992's UN Conference on Environment and Development, is "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Furthermore, it is recognized that sustainable development is a development that includes social, environmental and economic considerations.
However, after over 2 decades of globally recognizing the need for sustainable development, it is still hard to recognize what exactly we mean by those definitions. Several sustainable development indicators have been proposed to be able to recognize countries that are more sustainable developed than others, yet the results among different scales are sometimes contradictory (see Wilson et al, 2007 for a detailed comparison). This makes it hard to even recognize what sustainable development looks like.
The lack of an objective idea of what sustainable development is I believe comes from a very utopic vision of what sustainable development should be. The definition itself is almost impossible to achieve as meeting current needs without compromising future needs means that overtime (any kind of) resources should stay constant or grow, thus sustainable development is not a state but a process. That could explain why we haven´t find (and will never find) some situation that we can recognize as sustainable developed.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, the opposite actually. The fact that sustainable development is a moving target forces us to keep improving and becoming more and more sustainable. In this sense other more restricted programs can give solid steps towards this goal and have some sense of peace by objectively going in the right direction. Ideas like Green Growth, or Low Emissions Development Strategies bring more specific and achievable targets that promote sustainable development and can be an important step stone towards a sustainable future.
What is missing, ironically, is to update sustainable development by including an element implicit "sustainable" that is usually overseen: "steady state". This economic concept means that even if things are dynamic and changing, the indicators' levels stay at a constant level. If we can see this as the basic element of sustainable development, some indicators that measure not sustainable development per se, but "development" in general can be tracked and if they reach an steady state then we could have a measure of sustainable development.
So perhaps the reason why we haven´t found sustainable development is because we are looking for a state while it is actually a process, and as a process it will never be reached so perhaps instead of having the goal to attain sustainable development, we should have to goal to keep developing in a sustainable way.
- Wilson, Jeffrey, Peter Tyedmers, and Ronald Pelot. Contrasting and comparing sustainable development indicators metrics. Ecological Indicators 7 (2007) 299-314.
- World Commission on Environment and Development."Our Common Future, Chapter 2: Towards Sustainable Development"
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