ISSUES

A short introduction to sustainable development

The concept of sustainable development came about when we realised that there is an environmental price to pay for human development. This price is on the one hand the depletion of non-renewable resources such as the fossil fuels on which much of our current economic activity depends, and on the other hand the destruction of the environmental balance that creates the conditions supporting human life on the planet.

At the same time, the great socio-economic revolution that started with the French Revolution was demanding that we distribute the benefits acquired from using our natural resources in a more equitable manner between human beings. In a sense the natural world was seen as our common heritage of which all is entitled a fair share. But this would require that all people should be considered equal. As long as people of different genders, races, ability and religion were seen as having different claims on our common patrimony, this equal distribution will not take place. There is also the small matter of the rights of future generations to their fair share. This split the camp into those who believe we should use what we can now to uplift the poor and hungry, because if given a proper education and economic power those future generations will find other solutions and other riches; and the camp that sees the Earth's resources as an irreplaceable endowment, with current generations only entitled to the interest.

Sustainable development can therefore be seen as the coming together of three great moral debates. The first debate centres on how to create a just and equitable social order. It is the quest for freedom, equality and the right to pursue happiness that forms the basis of modern concepts of democracy and inspired the American, French and Russian Revolutions. This aspect of sustainable development looks at issues such as human rights and participatory governance, as well as quality of life issues and the meeting of human needs.

Central to creating a just and fair society, is the second debate: How do we equitably distribute wealth (in the form of access to resources and opportunities) and increase prosperity for all? Many models have been proposed, the most recent two being capitalism and communism. Capitalism believes that if there is equal opportunity for everyone, the market will determine the fair distribution of wealth. Communism, on the other hand, believes in a more central distribution of wealth "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs¹. Both these systems have exhibited serious flaws and led to a global society where the disparity between rich and poor is greater than ever before. So we are still floating on this one.

The third debate asks how do we achieve the above, while ensuring that the environment will continue to support human life and fulfil human needs for this and future generations. History is littered with civilisations (Sumeria, Babylon, and the Mayan civilisation to name a few) that collapsed because they exhausted not just their resource base (including the services provided by forest cover, arable land and potable water), but also the ability of their immediate environment to assimilate and neutralise their wastes (their sink capacity). Survivors of those earlier civilisations were fortunate in that they could move to another part of the world. The dilemma we are facing is that this time the civilisation in question has spread across the entire globe, rapidly exhausting resources and sink capacities worldwide.

Sustainable development is thus the endeavour to balance the need for socio-economic equity with that of sustaining the biophysical environment's ability to support an acceptable quality of human life. This is not a one-off goal to be achieved, but a continuous process requiring integrative and holistic decision-making from individuals as much as from governments and big business. The difficult thing about sustainable development is that it requires a fundamental change in our economic paradigm.

The development model that has been dominant for the past few centuries has brought us substantial comforts and benefits. Today even the poor in developed countries enjoy a standard of living that far exceeds that of the Egyptian pharaohs and the French Sun King. However, providing this standard of living for the entire global population is simply not possible. Most of our predictions regarding sink and source limits work on current consumption levels, with 20% of the global population using 80% of the resources. It is estimated that if the population of China's per capita consumption of oil was to match that of the USA, China annual oil consumption would exceed the current total global oil production with more than 30%. With China's economy booming and a new national automobile-based transport policy, the scenario is quite feasible (if there were enough resources to support it). The same would hold for other resources. A modernizing China upping its per capita beef consumption to that of the average America would use the entire US grain harvest as feed for its livestock. (It will need to import American grain because half of its currently productive arable land would be under paving and parking lots to accommodate all the new automobiles) Clearly, it is not feasible to expect that the entire world can live at the same level of consumption as that enjoyed in developed countries - which kind of puts a damper on the consumption-based economic growth that has been driving economic development for centuries. In a closed ecological system with finite resources, to improve the lot of the majority and ensure the well being of future generations, the excesses of the minority will have to be curbed. This is the rather unpalatable truth we are facing.

To facilitate international cooperation on sustainable development, several international agendas, strategies and charters have been formulated, of which the most famous three are Agenda 21, the Habitat Agenda and the Earth Charter. What most of these Agendas have in common is a sense of urgency, the assumption that if we do not act soon, it may be too late. For this reason, the sustainable development movement has often been described as alarmist. Critics often point out that the predictions made in the 1950's and again in the 1970's have not come true. What they do not seem to realise is the large time scales we are talking about. If business continued more or less as usual in the past thirty years that is because we have not reach the tipping point yet. The problem is that no one can predict when this will happen, and by the time it happens it will be far too late to do anything about it. But knowing what we know about the nature of natural systems, we can be sure that we will eventually arrive at that tipping point if we do not change our ways.

Experts claim that we are already experiencing the sixth major planetary extinction event. The last such event occurred 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs became extinct. There are many theories surrounding the causes of these extinction events, but most of these theories point to rapid climate change brought on by a variety of factors from meteor impacts to large-scale volcanic eruption and continental drift processes that released the CO2 trapped in the ocean. There can be no doubt that human activity of the past 10 000 years is directly contributing the current extinction event. Activities such as hunting, agriculture, industrialization and urbanization are destroying not just species, but entire ecosystems, and are doing it at an ever-accelerating rate.

Over the next few months we will be looking at some of the major issues caused by the impact of human activity has on the planetary ecosystem and the subsequent implications for socio-economic sustainability, as well as some more specific issues that impact on the built environment in South Africa.

For more about the principles of sustainable development, click here.

The following websites provide good entry points to the various issues of sustainability:

Global Issues: http://www.globalissues.org
World Resources Institute: http://www.wri.org
UNEP Global Environmental Outlook: http://www.grida.no/geo2000
World Watch Institute: http://www.worldwatch.org
World Disasters Report: http://www.ifrc.org/publicat/wdr2001
Poverty and development: http://www.worldbank.org
Earth Charter : http://www.earthcharter.org/
Agenda 21: http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/agenda21text.htm
Habitat Agenda: http://www.unchs.org/unchs/english/hagenda/

¹Anderson (ed) (1999) Towards Gondwana Alive. Pretoria: Gondwana Alive Society

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