Blog 5- Towards Sustainable Development

In 1983, the United Nations established a World's Commission on Environment and Development, which was awarded the responsibility of producing a "global agenda for change". The international effort of this agenda was to address global environmental issues while promoting equal economic development. The term "Sustainable Development" has become somewhat of a catchphrase that appears in most discussions regarding environmental issues.
Sustainable development is a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The term contains two important key elements: the "needs" of the worlds poor overriding priority; the limitations of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs. Renewable resources need not be depleted provided the rate of use is within the limits of regeneration and natural growth. Non-renewable resources use reduces the stock for future generations.
Thus the goals of social and economic development must share certain features, and must flow from the basic concept of sustainability. Attention must be paid to changes in access to resources, distributions of costs and benefits equitable between generations. Our world where poverty and inequity is evident, we are prone to ecological crisis. Sustainable development requires meeting the basic needs to extend the opportunity for a better life, it requires economic growth where needs have not yet been met.
High levels of productive activity and poverty are related and both endanger the environment. Technological development may solve some immediate problems but lead to even greater ones.
Minimally, sustainable development must not endanger the natural systems that support life on Earth: the atmosphere, the waters, the soils, and the living beings.
One problem is that growth has no limits in terms of population or resource exploitation which is an ecological disaster.
Development tends to simplify ecosystems and reduce their diversity of species. Species, once extinct, are non-renewable.
Overall, sustainable development is a process change which exploitation of resources, action of investments, technological development, and institutional change are interlinked and include both current and future generations.
Sustainable development can be achieved with education, institutional development on strict liability, and law enforcement.
Everything would be better if everyone took into account the effect their own actions upon others. But each is unwilling to assume that others will behave in this socially advantageous way, therefore all continue in a narrow self-interest.
Since the issue of pollution is beyond borders, there needs to be an international cooperation.
Globally, wealthier nations are better placed with their finances and technologies to cope with possible climate change, hence our undesire to stop social injustice.
The role of public policy is to ensure, through incentives, that organizations find it worthwhile to take account for environmental factors in technologies they develop.
There is a need to integrate economic and ecological considerations in decision making, sustainability needs the environment and economics to merge.
Sustainability requires enforcement on responsibilities of people' s impacts of their decisions. This requires a stricter legal framework. But the law alone cannot enforce common interest. Communities' knowledge and support principles need greater public participation in the decisions that affect the environment.
What matters is that the goals take action on national and international development, and the sincerity and effectiveness of these actions.