Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development and the UN Debates

The Earth Summit was called to harmonize the many disparate paths of environmental protection that countries had pursued since the UN Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, 25 years earlier. Many industrialized countries had incorporated environmental protection into their policymaking, but in the developing world, change had been much slower. Few developing countries had the capacity to respond to environmental threats, and still fewer had any inclination to build the capacity to do so. The major reason for this perceived discrepancy was that for the countries of the global South, environmental protection was inseparable from economic issues. Because of the persistence of severe poverty and perceived injustice in the [Page 2748]global South, environmental protection never attained the level of public concern that it did in the global North. This realization convinced the WCED (which issued the Brundtland Report) that it was futile to attempt to address environmental problems without a broader perspective that encompassed the factors underlying world poverty. When the WCED presented its report to the UN General Assembly in 1987, among its recommendations was a call for the UN to prepare a universal declaration and a convention on environmental protection and sustainable development. The official and stated purpose of the UNCED was to design strategies and measures to halt and reverse the effects of environmental degradation in the context of increased national and international efforts to promote sustainable and environmentally sound development in all countries. As a result, the mandate of the Earth Summit was extremely broad.

The WCED defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The report called for cooperation between government and business and for the use of technology to address the pressing problems of balancing the social and economic needs of a growing world population with the requirements of a healthy ecosystem. The view prevailed that concerns about sustainability would stimulate society's efforts to become less resource intensive through the use of new technologies and to become more concerned about fulfilling human needs through global environmental management. The Commission was confident that human society would reverse the conflicts between economic growth and the environment, alleviate poverty, and lead the global community to greater cooperation between the global North and the global South.

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