Brundtland Commission

The United Nations (UN) established the Brundtland Commission, officially known as the World Commission on Environment and Development, in 1983 to examine the effect of environmental degradation and natural resource depletion on future economic and social development around the world and to propose responses. The commission's 1987 report, Our Common Future, is considered a landmark in global environmental politics because it helped to define, legitimize, and popularize the concept of sustainable development.

The World Commission on Environment and Development is commonly referred to as the Brundtland Commission in recognition of its chair, former Norwegian prime minister Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland. The United Nations Secretary-General's choice of Brundtland to chair the sensitive project reflected the political respect he had earned in many capitals around the world, including both industrialized and developing countries; his experience in environment and development issues (he had also previously served as Norway's Environment Minister); and the belief that he could manage the project to a meaningful and successful conclusion.

In creating the commission, the UN General Assembly requested that it focus its work on proposing long-term strategies for achieving sustainable development; highlighting avenues for more effective cooperation among countries that take account of the interrelationships among people, resources, environment, and development; helping to define shared perceptions of long-term environmental issues; and considering ways that the international community can deal more effectively with environmental concerns, taking into account development needs and other issues. To address these issues, Brundtland and the

United Nations gathered leading scientists, lawmakers, diplomats, and ministers to staff or advise the commission. In 1987, after 3 years of research and public hearings on five continents, the Brundtland Commission published Our Common Future. The 400-page report was formally submitted to the United Nations General Assembly for consideration and was widely read around the world following its publication by Oxford University Press.

Our Common Future introduced the term sustainable development into broad usage, legitimizing the concept in the minds of many observers. The definition of the term used in the report became well known and often cited: “Sustainable development is development that meets the need of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The Brundtland Commission also asserted that the concept of sustainable development contained within it two other intrinsic ideas: “the concept of ‘needs,’ in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs.” These elements of detail in the commission's definition drew less attention but influenced thinking on the commission [Page 43]regarding both the priority that it believed should be given to meeting the needs of the world's poor (development) and the reality that certain technological and economic practices were depleting resources at rates that threaten that development.

Our Common Future described a number of key, interconnected environmental and developmental issues—areas in which future developments would be critical to determining whether sustainable development is achievable. These included population and human resources; food security, which also includes issues of distribution and trade; species and ecosystem preservation; sustainable energy paths and consumption patterns; industrial production; and urbanization. The Brundtland Commission concluded that three broad initiatives were necessary to orient these issues on the right path: reexamining crucial environment and development problems and identifying realistic solutions to avoid dire consequences in the future, proposing new international cooperative efforts to create policies to achieve the needed solutions, and developing far greater reservoirs of awareness, knowledge, and responsibility in all political and social communities.

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