What are the roots of sustainable development?

Ideas about sustainable development have deep roots. This chapter takes a historical approach to describe the evolution of ideas on which thinking about sustainable development grew. It identifies four themes, overlapping in time. The first is the idea of nature as a resource. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nature was mostly understood as a resource for commerce to exploit, but by the end of the nineteenth century the idea of wise use or resource conservation was widely discussed. The second theme concerns the idea that nature needed to be protected from exploitation. In the nineteenth century, conservation organisations began to be established and national parks were created. From the 1950s, conservationists began to protect nature by trying to influence the way development planning was done. The third theme considers the growth of ecology and its influence on the way nature and living resources were conceived and the way economic development was planned. The fourth theme is the emergence of environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s, with its increasingly global perspective and its concerns about resource depletion, population growth and industrialisation.

The concept of sustainable development formed the basis of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The summit marked the first international attempt to draw up action plans and strategies for moving towards a more sustainable pattern of development. It was attended by over 100 Heads of State and representatives from 178 national governments. The Summit was also attended by representatives from a range of other organisations representing civil society. Sustainable development was the solution to the problems of environmental degradation discussed by the Brundtland Commission in the 1987 report Our Common Future.

The remit of the Brundtland Report was to investigate the numerous concerns that had been raised in previous decades, namely, that human activity was having severe and negative impacts on the planet, and that patterns of growth and development would be unsustainable if they continued unchecked. Key works that highlighted this thinking included Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Garret Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons (1968), the Blueprint for Survival by the Ecologist magazine (1972) and the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth report (1972).

The concept of sustainable development received its first major international recognition in 1972 at the UN Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm. The term was not referred to explicitly, but nevertheless the international community agreed to the notion - now fundamental to sustainable development - that both development and the environment, hitherto addressed as separate issues, could be managed in a mutually beneficial way.

The term was popularised 15 years later in Our Common Future, the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, which included what is deemed the 'classic' definition of sustainable development: "development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".

It was not until the Rio Summit, however, that major world leaders recognised sustainable development as the major challenge it remains today.

More recently, the World Summit on Sustainable Development was held in Johannesburg in 2002, attended by 191 national governments, UN agencies, multilateral financial institutions and other major groups to assess progress since Rio. The Johannesburg Summit delivered three key outcomes: a political declaration, the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, and a range of partnership initiatives. Key commitments included those on sustainable consumption and production, water and sanitation, and energy.

Corporate adoption of sustainable business practices is essential to a strong market environment and an enduring society. What does it mean to become a sustainable business and what steps must leaders take to integrate sustainability into their organization?

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Management literature today abounds with stories about the business case for sustainability. Eco-efficiency, or delivering more value for less environmental burden, has been touted as the primary instrument for achieving sustainability. So has socially responsible investing —using the power of the financial market to punish the bad guys and reward those firms that are doing the “right” thing. Many companies now offer slick “sustainability reports” along with their annual reports as indicators of their performance. The problem is that none of this espoused benevolence creates true sustainability. At best, it only temporarily slows society’s continuing drift toward unsustainability; at worst, it serves as feel-good marketing for products and services that in fact degrade and pollute our environment and fail to meaningfully satisfy the needs of consumers.

The root of this problem is neither business’s misunderstanding of what’s at stake nor corporate cynicism about the sustainability cause (though these may be contributing factors). The problem really stems from management’s failure to see unsustainability as a deep-seated systems failure and to appreciate the extent to which radical thinking and action are required to embark upon a sustainable trajectory. Given this great blindness, one must ask a critical question: Can anything be done to radically transform the way that businesses work?

The idea of what is referred to as “sustainable development” arose in part when people became aware that we could no longer maintain our global drive toward continuing economic growth without exhausting our finite resources. (Many claim that we already have exceeded the capacity to support the current level of affluence.) And no rational person, except perhaps the most technologically optimistic economist, would claim that projected global population levels can be sustained at anywhere near the levels of affluence found in the United States or other highly developed countries. To date, however, virtually all efforts to produce sustainable development have been little more than Band-Aids. Many, such as increases in automobile fuel efficiency, come in the form of technical quick fixes.

Shifting the Burden

Over time, the business community has gotten in the habit of ignoring the source of the problem, and now it risks gradually losing the ability to think deeply about it in order to produce the right kind of innovative solutions. The systems dynamics community calls this behavioral pattern “shifting the burden.&

About the Author

John R. Ehrenfeld is executive director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology. Contact him at [email protected].

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