What is sustainable development
There are numerous perspectives on sustainable development, internationally. The idea of sustainable development appeared in the World Conservation Strategy of 1980, and in 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development Brundtland Report "Our Common Future" stated that sustainable development was the priority objective of all economic policy. The concept was endorsed the following year at Toronto by world leaders including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and has since underpinned the 1993 Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the 1993 UN Convention on Biological Diversity, as well as Agenda 21 of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the "Rio Earth Summit".
The Brundtland Report definition of sustainable development is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". The report clearly envisioned growth as central to advancement of the underdeveloped nations, and sustainability could effectively be measured by whether or not aggregate stocks of natural resources were being maintained or depleted. The interests of people were paramount, and Principle 12 of Agenda 21 warned that national environmental protection should not restrict international trade. So the concept that prevailed was a kind of global accounting of the resources of the world, and ensuring there was enough to support current and future generations, especially through free trade. This has become known as the "weak" definition of sustainable development, and has also been criticised on the grounds of the vagueness of the concept of "needs": does this include desires, and aspirations, for example.
On the other hand, the World Conservation Union, United Nations Environment Programme, and the World Wide Fund for Nature, in their 1991 report "Caring for the Earth", suggested that sustainable development was "improving the quality of life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems". This is known as the "strong" definition of sustainable development. There is in fact a plethora of definitions of sustainable development, and people nowadays are more concerned with achievements than semantics.
From a pragmatic perspective, it seems that in different contexts, different notions of sustainable development provide a means for advancing thought and practice beyond more traditional notions of development that pay more limited attention to environmental concerns. Creative Decisions prefers the WCU/UNEP/WWFN definition, coupled with the pragmatic idea of sustainable development as linked to the concept of ecosystem health. Costanza and Mageau suggested in 1999 that a healthy ecosystem is one that "is sustainable - that is, it has the ability to maintain its structure (organisation) and function (vigour) over time in the face of external stress (resilience)." This formed the foundations for our NZ2100 framework. While many reserve the concept of "ecosystem" for natural entities, we believe that it is useful to consider human-dominated systems, such as farms, cities, and neighbourhoods, as ecosystems, or as systems that can at least be modelled after natural ecosystems, for the purpose of improving their relationship with the wider landscape of natural ecosystems. Thus sustainable development is development that leads to a mosaic of healthy, coexisting and mutually supportive natural and human-dominated ecosystems. The contribution of NZ2100 is to offer a coherent and durable definition of ecosystem health that applies to natural and human-dominated ecosystems.
The central problem of sustainable development
There are three major issues that concern those who advance the notion of sustainable development:
- Achieving future social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being is jeopardised by current human-economic systems that have become increasingly dominated by materialistic values;
- Our decisions are poorly informed by information on risks and tradeoffs that would allow for better recognition of their social, environmental, and cultural dimensions: people don't understand what kind of world they are, or could be, creating;
- There is a fundamental need for a unifying, non-threatening credo or set of values that provides a basis for strategic as well as daily decisions, both conscious and subconscious, that will provide for human advancement and recognises interdependence with the natural environment.
Creative Decisions provides tools and methods that address these concerns explicitly. We acknowledge that our position on sustainable development involves more "stretch" or ambition than that embodied in the Brundtland definition. However, if we are to motivate communities and nations to achieve sustainable development, then it is imperative that the vision that is presented is positive, and goes beyond the concept of survival and basic needs. Mankind as a whole has proven itself to be very adaptable to changing circumstances, but we also need to strive to develop human societies, and the individuals within them, in all their dimensions. This provides the positive, inspirational impetus for change, even though we may also be motivated by the negative consequences of unsustainable development. It also provides an insurance policy: aiming simply for survival courts the possibility of failure; aiming beyond survival increases the chance that mankind will survive the challenges of sustainability, but in a way that is enriching rather than exhausting. Thus the KiwiGrow™ framework does present a challenge, but it is also an inspirational vision of ecological harmony that can help to motivate the massive changes in society that are required if sustainable development is to become reality.
