Sustainable Development

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainability can be hard to define, but a useful conceptual framing examines whether a process depletes a resource faster than it can be naturally replenished and whether it generates harms that grow to outweigh its benefits. In particular, many have questioned whether sustainable development is compatible with the existing global paradigm of growth-based capitalism, or whether we need radically new ideas (spoiler: we do).

Today, sustainable development is embodied in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which specify targets and indicators related to seventeen broad goals in areas as diverse as ending poverty (Goal 1), ensuring health and wellbeing (Goal 3), creating sustainable cities and communities (Goal 11), confronting climate change (Goal 13), and fostering peace, justice, and strong institutions (Goal 16).

Selected Readings

The concept of sustainable development dates back at least half a century to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (the Stockholm conference) in 1972, but the term was first codified by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 in Our Common Future (AKA the Brundtland report). The SDGs took form in the 2015 UN Resolution Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Sustainable development is the most complex collective commitment humans have ever made, and there are countless synergies and constraints among individual SDGs; in 2016, I contributed to an International Science Council report laying out a framework for assessing SDG interactions. In 2019, I joined David Tan and other colleagues in applying new systems-oriented methods for place-based case studies to localization of the SDGs in a piece for Globalization and Health, drawing on work from the SCHEMA project I co-led at the UN University International Institute for Global Health.

Selected Readings