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Introduction to Sustainable Development for Engineering and Built Environment Professionals
Unit 1 - A New Perspective
Lecture
1: The Call for Sustainable Development
To
provide the context within which the call for sustainable
development arose. In its 2003 report, ‘Sustainable
Development in a Dynamic World’, the World
Bank summed up why so many people are now concerned
about achieving sustainable development,[1]
The
next 50 years could see a fourfold increase in
the size of the global economy and significant
reductions in poverty, but only if governments
act now to avert a growing risk of severe damage
to the environment and profound social unrest.
Without better policies and institutions, social
and environmental strains may derail development
progress, leading to higher poverty levels and
a decline in the quality of life for everybody.
Hargroves,
K. and Smith, M.H. (2005) The Natural Advantage
of Nations: Business Opportunities, Innovation and
Governance in the 21st Century, Earthscan,
London:
- Preface
(4 pages), pp.xxxvii-xli.
- Foreword
- Alan AtKisson (2 pages), pp.xvii-xviii.
1. We live in times of major change: information
and communication technology, globalisation, genetic
engineering, nanotechnology, threats of terrorism,
natural disasters, changing demographics, and aging
population. We are constantly learning more and
at the same time becoming aware of how much we don’t
know about our global system.
2. Our institutions (government, business, and society
in general) are being required to adapt and respond
to new challenges more rapidly than ever before.
We are learning that we need to innovate solutions
and systems that are both locally appropriate and
globally relevant.
3. Of all these issues and challenges for the 21st
Century, two have emerged of significant common
concern globally: a) the irreversible decline of
the resilience of natural systems, and b) the lack
of progress on global inequality and poverty.
4. We are now beginning to understand the complex
interactions and inter-relationships in the natural
environment and that as a closed system (with only
sun light coming into it), there will be a range
of threshold effects if the practices of the industrial
revolution continue in their current form.
5. Sustainable development is defined in the Report
of the 1987 World Commission on Environment and
Development Our Common Future,[2]
as ‘development that meets the needs of
the present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs’.
6. Sustainable development simply means development
that genuinely sustains and improves economic, social
and environmental wellbeing with no major trade
offs, locally and globally, now and in the future.
7. Many in the mainstream still see trade-offs between
social, environmental and economic goals as inevitable.
Yet to solve the problems and issues of sustainable
development, we need integrated approaches. Addressing
these concerns and developing integrated solutions
with ‘win-win-win’ opportunities is
fundamental to solving them cost effectively and
potentially profitably as well.
8. In the 1980s a range of major initiatives began
to find common ground and overcome the ’us
versus them’ modus operandi of the ‘environment
movement versus developers’.
9. Since the World Commission on Sustainable Development’s
Report in 1987 there have been further significant
efforts to integrate work showing that sustainable
development is achievable cost effectively. Books
such as Natural Capitalism, Cradle
to Cradle and Factor 4 brought a range
of new possibilities for the future together for
the first time.
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Brief
Background Information |
The
following information provides a brief overview
of related background material, from The Natural
Advantage of Nations.
Even a cursory overview of human history will conclude
that the last few centuries have witnessed unprecedented
change. The world, in large measure, has shifted
from local agrarian economies to globalised industrial
economies with instant financial capital flows in
the trillions of dollars daily, exchanging goods
and services around the world at the touch of a
button.
Technologies considered science fiction 100 years
ago are now reality. In the last 30 years more scientific
papers have been published than all the previous
centuries. As Jared Diamond showed in his analysis
of the last 13,000 years of civilisation, in Guns,
Germs and Steel,[3]
technological innovation tends to gather momentum
rather than stagnate.
Far from slowing down, technological change has
sped up. Modern industrialism began in a world completely
different from today. It was a world with relatively
few people and seemingly endless natural resources.
It possessed a poor industrial capacity that struggled
to create enough for all.
Today, by contrast in many countries, labour productivity
has increased to such an extent that the industrial
capacity can produce more than the market can consume.
The original mission to improve labour productivity
by improving technology has largely succeeded. Globally,
for instance, enough food is being produced to feed
the world. The problem now is that not enough people
can afford to buy it. While billions starve and
23,000 children die each day in the world from malnutrition,
in some countries farmers are being paid subsidies
not to farm their land. More importantly, today
we now understand that natural resources are not
limitless. Many of the resources we have taken for
granted are now showing their finite nature and
due to the rapid increase in demand many of these
resources are in danger of being exhausted.
Business
As Usual
However,
most industry and government still operates on a
business-as-usual principle: basing progress largely
on labour productivity and Gross Domestic Product
(GDP). However, the work of Nobel Laureate Joseph
Stiglitz shows that this ‘productivity’
simply measures the productivity of those employed
and tells us nothing about all those that are unemployed.
This doesn’t take into account additional
measures of progress such as the productivity of
the whole population, poverty reduction or how efficiently
we use resources. The present wisdom uses more and
more non-renewable resources to make fewer people
more productive. The results are all around us,
namely a massive waste of people and resources.
There are approximately one billion people unemployed
globally. The World Bank Annual Report for 2003
stated that more than one billion people are living
on less than US$1 a day.[4]
Out of these concerns - particularly the decline
of ecosystem resilience and the lack of significant
progress on addressing global inequality - has come
the call for ‘sustainable development’.
Defining
Sustainable Development
In
1987, the report of the World Commission on Environment
and Development, Our Common Future, recognised
that humankind's relationship with the planet had
changed forever due to our immense technical capacity:
Over
the course of the 20th century the relationship
between the human world and the planet that sustains
it has undergone a profound change... major, unintended
changes are occurring in the atmosphere, in soils,
in waters, among plants and animals, and in the
relationships among all of these. The rate of
change is outstripping the ability of scientific
disciplines and our current capabilities to assess
and advise. It is frustrating the attempts of
political and economic institutions, which evolved
in a different, more fragmented world, to adapt
and cope... To keep options open for future generations,
the present generation must begin now, and begin
together, nationally and internationally.
Gro
Brundtland, Our Common Future , 1987[5]
Our Common Future coined the phrase ‘sustainable
development’ to sum up this new paradigm of
development. It defined sustainable development
as, ‘development that meets the needs
of the present without compromising the ability
of future generations to meet their own needs’,
and was instrumental in achieving the acceptance
of the emerging paradigm of sustainable development
in mainstream governmental structures, departments
and programs. Support for this new form of development
was demonstrated by the attendance at the first
World Summit for Sustainable Development in Rio
De Janeiro in 1992, of more than a hundred world
leaders and representatives from 167 countries.
Kofi
Annan, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, 2001 stated on
World Environment Day in 2000:
We
need a major public education effort. Understanding
of these challenges we face is alarming low. Corporations
and consumers alike need to recognize that their
choices can have significant consequences. Schools
and civil society groups have a crucial role to
play.
Kofi Annan, United Nations
Secretary-General, 2000[6]
Subsequent
to the 1987 definition, sustainable development
is academically defined as ‘development
that improves the wellbeing and opportunities of
the present generation whilst ensuring non-declining
wellbeing for future generations’. This
simply means development that genuinely sustains
and improves economic, social and environmental
wellbeing with no major trade-offs, locally and
globally, now and in the future.
The
West Australian Premier, Dr Geoff Gallop, summed
up the situation well when he stated:
For
many years we pursued economic, environmental
and social goals in isolation from each other.
We have come to recognise that our long-term well-being
depends as much on the promotion of a strong,
vibrant society and the ongoing repair of our
environment as it does on the pursuit of economic
development. Indeed, it is becoming obvious that
these issues cannot be separated. The challenge
is to find new approaches to development that
contribute to our environment and society now
without degrading them over the longer term.
Dr. Geoff Gallop, 2003[7]
Extract:
The Natural Advantage of Nations -- 'No Major Trade-offs'[8]
One
of the critically important implications to the
decision-making process of trying to achieve sustainable
development - given the situation where society
simultaneously pursues a range of goals - is that
it must be based on the principle ‘no major
trade-offs’. Logically, if society is committed
to sustaining something, it cannot trade-off the
continued existence of that thing in order to meet
other goals. Similarly, in a ‘multiple bottom
line’ approach it is desirable for actions
taken in the pursuit of one goal to also contribute
to the achievement of other goals: ‘win-win-win’
outcomes.
In the past, following a rather simplistic application
of optimisation theory, it has been assumed that
the pursuit of multiple goals means that no one
goal can be maximised; there must be major trade-offs.
However, in complex systems such as economies, societies
and ecosystems we are still so far from a theoretical
perfect optimum that there is huge potential to
find solutions that can deliver multiple goals with
‘no-major-trade-offs’ and ‘win-win
outcomes’. To deliver such outcomes does require
a major commitment to foster innovation and to greatly
increase the capability of long-term thinking and
the handling of complex issues.
Take for instance the award winning, AU$3 billion
project to tackle salinity in south-western Western
Australia. The company, Woodside Petroleum, is the
partner for a biomass/activated charcoal/eucalyptus
oil project that will involve the planting of millions
of mallee eucalyptus trees to lower the water table
and thus mitigate the effects of salinity in Western
Australia. The activated charcoal from plantations
will take the pressure off the native forests that
are presently being harvested to provide activated
charcoal for the global market, as it is in high
demand as a reductant in mineral refining. Finally,
it will also act as a carbon sink while creating
new jobs.
This course will show, through such case studies,
that genuine win-win-win opportunities exist and
are relatively cost effective compared with current
modes of development.
-
Brown, L. et al (2000) State of the
World 2000, The WorldWatch Institute.
-
Brown, L. et al (2000) Vital Signs
2000-2001, The WorldWatch Institute.
-
Bruntland, G. (ed) (1987) Our Common Future:
The World Commission on Environment and Development,
Oxford University Press, Oxford.
-
Hawken, P. Lovins, A.B. and Lovins, L.H. (1999)
Natural Capitalism, Earthscan, London.
-
McDonough, W. and Braungart, M. (2001) 'The Next
Industrial Revolution', in Allen, P. (ed) Metaphors
for Change, Greenleaf Books, London.
-
von Weizsaecker, E., Lovins, A. and Lovins, H. (1997)
Factor 4: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource
Use, Earthscan, London.
-
Brundtland
Report
-
Agenda
21
-
WorldWatch
Institute Organisation
-
Johannesburg
Summit 2002
[1]
World Bank (2003) World Development Report 2003:
Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World, World
Bank, Washington D.C. (Back)
[2]
Brundtland, G. (ed.) (1987) Our Common Future:
The World Commission on Environment and Development,
Oxford University Press, Oxford. This publication
is also commonly referred to as the Brundtland
Report. (Back)
[3]
Diamond, J. (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The
Fates of Human Societies, W.W. Norton & Company,
New York. A companion website for Guns, Germs
and Steel is available at PBS (2005) Guns,
Germs and Steel Homepage. Available at www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel.
Accessed 7 June 2006. (Back)
[4]
The Report, which covers the period from July 1, 2002
to June 30, 2003, has been prepared by the Executive
Directors of both the International Bank for Reconstruction
and Development (IBRD) and the International Development
Association (IDA) in accordance with the respective
by-laws of the two institutions. James D. Wolfensohn,
President of the IBRD and IDA, and Chairman of the
Board of Executive Directors, has submitted this report,
together with the accompanying administrative budgets
and audited financial statements, to the Board of
Governors. (Back)
[5]
Brundtland, G. (ed.) (1987) Our Common Future:
The World Commission on Environment and Development,
Oxford University Press, Oxford. This publication
is also commonly referred to as the Brundtland
Report. (Back)
[6]
United Nations Information Service (2000) UN Secretary
General Marking World Environment Day, 31 May
2000. Available at http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/pressrels/2000/sg2582.html?print.
Accessed 3 January 2007. (Back)
[7]
Hargroves, K. Smith, M.H. (2005) The Natural Advantage
of Nations: Business Opportunities, Innovation and
Governance in the 21 st Century, Earthscan, London,
Chapter 3: Asking the Right Questions, p 47. (Back)
[8]
Ibid. (Back)
The
Natural Edge Project Engineering Sustainable Solutions
Program is supported by the Australian National Commission
for UNESCO through the International Relations Grants
Program of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
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