Sustainable Development (SD) is a process for meeting human development goals while sustaining the ability of natural systems to continue to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services upon which the economy and society depend. While the modern concept of sustainable development is derived most strongly from the 1987 Brundtland Report, it is rooted in earlier ideas about sustainable forest management and twentieth century environmental concerns.
Sustainable development is the organizing principle for sustaining finite resources necessary to provide for the needs of future generations of life on the planet. It is a process that envisions a desirable future state for human societies in which living conditions and resource-use continue to meet human needs without undermining the “integrity, stability and beauty” of natural biotic systems.
Dimensions
Sustainable development has been described in terms of three dimensions, domains or pillars. In the three-dimension model, these are seen as “economic, environmental and social” or “ecology, economy and equity”; this has been expanded by some authors to include a fourth pillar of culture, institutions or governance.
Ecology – The ecological sustainability of human settlements is part of the relationship between humans and their natural, social and built environments. Also termed human ecology, this broadens the focus of sustainable development to include the domain of human health. Fundamental human needs such as the availability and quality of air, water, food and shelter are also the ecological foundations for sustainable development; addressing public health risk through investments in ecosystem services can be a powerful and transformative force for sustainable development which, in this sense, extends to all species.
Agriculture – Sustainable agriculture consists of environmentally-friendly methods of farming that allow the production of crops or livestock without damage to human or natural systems. It involves preventing adverse effects to soil, water, biodiversity, surrounding or downstream resources—as well as to those working or living on the farm or in neighboring areas. The concept of sustainable agriculture extends intergenerationally, passing on a conserved or improved natural resource, biotic, and economic base rather than one which has been depleted or polluted. Elements of sustainable agriculture include permaculture, agroforestry, mixed farming, multiple cropping, and crop rotation.
Numerous sustainability standards and certification systems have been established in recent years, offering consumer choices for sustainable agriculture practices. These include Organic certification, Rainforest Alliance, Fair Trade, UTZ Certified, Bird Friendly, and the Common Code for the Coffee Community (4C).
Energy – Sustainable energy is the sustainable provision of energy that is clean and lasts for a long period of time. Unlike the fossil fuel that most of the countries are using, renewable energy only produces little or even no pollution. The most common types of renewable energy in US are solar and wind energy, solar energy are commonly used on public parking meter, street lights and the roof of buildings. Wind energy has expanded quickly, generating 12,000 MW in 2013. The largest wind power station is in Texas and California. Household energy consumption can also be improved in a sustainable way, like using electronics with Energy Star logos which conserve water and energy. Most of California’s fossil fuel infrastructures are sited in or near low-income communities, and have traditionally suffered the most from California’s fossil fuel energy system. These communities are historically left out during the decision-making process, and often end up with dirty power plants and other dirty energy projects that poison the air and harm the area. These toxicants are major contributors to health problems in the communities. As renewable energy becomes more common, fossil fuel infrastructures is replaced by renewables, providing better social equity to these community.
Transportation – Transportation is a large contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. It is said that one-third of all gasses produced are due to transportation. Some western countries are making transportation more sustainable in both long-term and short-term implementations. An example is the modifications in available transportation in Freiburg, Germany. The city has implemented extensive methods of public transportation, cycling, and walking, along with large areas where cars are not allowed.
Since many western countries are highly automobile-orientated areas, the main transit that people use is personal vehicles. About 80% of their travel involves cars. Therefore, California, deep in the automobile-oriented west, is one of the highest greenhouse gases emitters in the country. The federal government has to come up with some plans to reduce the total number of vehicle trips in order to lower greenhouse gases emission.
Business – The most broadly accepted criterion for corporate sustainability constitutes a firm’s efficient use of natural capital. This eco-efficiency is usually calculated as the economic value added by a firm in relation to its aggregated ecological impact. This idea has been popularised by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) under the following definition: “Eco-efficiency is achieved by the delivery of competitively priced goods and services that satisfy human needs and bring quality of life, while progressively reducing ecological impacts and resource intensity throughout the life-cycle to a level at least in line with the earth’s carrying capacity.” (DeSimone and Popoff, 1997: 47)
Similar to the eco-efficiency concept but so far less explored is the second criterion for corporate sustainability. Socio-efficiency describes the relation between a firm’s value added and its social impact. Whereas, it can be assumed that most corporate impacts on the environment are negative (apart from rare exceptions such as the planting of trees) this is not true for social impacts. These can be either positive (e.g. corporate giving, creation of employment) or negative (e.g. work accidents, mobbing of employees, human rights abuses). Depending on the type of impact socio-efficiency thus either tries to minimize negative social impacts (i.e. accidents per value added) or maximise positive social impacts (i.e. donations per value added) in relation to the value added.
Both eco-efficiency and socio-efficiency are concerned primarily with increasing economic sustainability. In this process they instrumentalize both natural and social capital aiming to benefit from win-win situations. However, as Dyllick and Hockerts point out the business case alone will not be sufficient to realise sustainable development. They point towards eco-effectiveness, socio-effectiveness, sufficiency, and eco-equity as four criteria that need to be met if sustainable development is to be reached.
Daly’s Operational Principles
Herman Daly put forward a set of operational principles for achieving SD. These were:
- Renewable resources: keep harvest rates less than or equal to growth rates. This has always been the principle of fisheries in economics
- Non renewable resources: each time period, invest sufficient of the income from extracting the resource in renewable substitutes and make only the residue available in current consumption .A sufficient level of investment here is one which, by the time the non renewable resource is exhausted, a renewable substitute has been built up with the same productive capacity as the non renewable resource did at the time the extraction started.
- Pollutants: At any time period, we must make sure that the emissions do not exceed the assimilative capacity of the receiving environment.
- Controls should be placed on the scale of the world economy. Scale refers to the total matter energy throughout the economy and in Daly’s view increasing scale has resulted in increasing threats to human welfare. Price controls do not do so well in terms of controlling scale of activity so Daly advocated tighter quantity controls, for example, on total pollution emissions, energy use, resource use and most controversially on population
- Daly does not mention any rules relating to the stock of human capital which is a clear weakness in his approach.
Hartwik Solow criterion
A sustainable state is one where utility is non declining over time. Robert Solow justified this using Rawlsian ethics and defined society as sustainable if it satisfies the criteria of intergenerational equity-that is, if per capita utility of all the future generations remains constant. Deriving the necessary and sufficient conditions of the constancy of undiscounted utility of per capita consumption over time is a difficult task. Hence, economists define sustainability as a constant consumption over time, as proposed by John Hartwick.
Harwtick Solow criterion ignores the concepts of minimum threshold levels of consumption, that is, it does not require any conditions of how large the non declining level of consumption should initially be. By implication, an economy can be sustainable even if living consumption standards are abysmally low-a perverse interpretation.
Non Renewable Energy and Sustainable Development
The implications of sustainable development become more difficult to sort out with respect to non-renewable resources—fossil fuels, minerals, and so forth. On the surface, it is obviously impossible to use a non-renewable resource “sustainably”; each unit of a non-renewable resource used is one less unit from a finite pool. But it is not immediately clear whether and how non-renewable resources such as oil, gas, and minerals should be conserved. It is not even self-evident that running out of a resource necessarily impinges on the ability of future generations to meet their needs.
For example, using whale oil in the nineteenth century as an input for energy or manufacturing was clearly unsustainable. And obviously it wasn’ t sustained. The hunting of whales to near extinction may have threatened the biological diversity of the planet, but the depletion of whale oil as a resource did not impede succeeding generations from growing and meeting their needs, and, not coincidentally, protecting and restoring the whale population at the same time.
This points to the problem of having a static view of our resource consumption and production, and the paradoxical problem of having a sufficiently long time horizon. The paradox is that our technological and resource utilization mix is certain to continue changing as rapidly, if not more rapidly, than it has for the past century, yet the longer the time horizon we try to anticipate, the less certain we can be of the conditions and challenges facing our successors.
While it may be reasonable to suppose that there is an eventual limit to the process of resource substitutability and technological innovation that has constantly expanded the resource pool throughout history, there is no compelling evidence to conclude that this limit is imminent within the next few generations. At this point, the outer limit of resource creation is more a speculative than a scientific estimation. Most current non-renewable resources, including oil and gas, will last several generations even at projected rates of increased use.
In light of this understanding, energy efficiency policy goals need to be carefully assessed. Efficiency of any kind is always to be desired, but if it costs a constant $2 for every $1 of energy efficiency achieved, total resources are probably being wasted rather than conserved, and therefore the “efficiency” may not be environmentally benign. Many advocates of alternative energy argue that efficiency-forcing policies contribute to increased productivity and help create new markets. If this is true, such policies would be that economic rarity, the free lunch.
Many resource-intensive industries are finding that it is not only possible, but profitable, to reduce material usage and pollution, and they have embarked on ambitious programs to reduce material use and pollution without the prod of legal mandates. In other words, we have reached a point at which environmental improvement in our industrial processes need no longer be regarded necessarily as a deadweight cost, as was supposed at the time of the first regulatory mandates 30 years ago. This accounts, for example, for the chemical industry’s 50-percent reduction in “releases” in the Toxics Release Inventory. Some companies have set targets of as much as a 90-percent reduction in air emissions, 50-percent reduction in wastewater emissions, and 20-percent reduction in energy use per unit of production.65 The point is, when sustainable development is conceived as a technical problem rather than a global metaphysical and social problem, progress becomes both manageable and measurable.
Renewable Energy and Sustainable Development
The Brundtland Commission Report on sustainable development is said to be the most pertinent for several reasons. Politicians and policymakers began comparing the abilities of their country to meet the needs of future generations with the abilities of foreign countries to do the same. This brought the world closer together and united the national authorities of innumerable countries to achieve the common goal of sustain abilities. Sustainable energy development strategies include three major technological changes
- Energy saving on the demand side
- Efficiency improvements in energy production
- Replacement of fossil fuels by various sources of renewable energy
Energy saving on the demand side is a herculean task as it requires cooperation from not only the citizens (regardless of their economic or social position) but also the government, the judiciary and the firms. Energy saving should be an important part of the day to day lives of every individual but unfortunately, this is rarely ever the case.
Efficiency improvements in energy production, is also a very broad objective which requires technological advancements of a large scale. In a labor intensive, poor developing country like India ,this is possible only through greater dealings with advanced countries. However, it is a universally acknowledged truth, that developed countries exploit the natural resources and adversely affect the economies of developing countries whenever cross border dealings are unrestricted. The pollution haven hypothesis provides testament to this fact as it postulates that with increased globalization ,advanced countries tend to use developing countries as a dumping ground for their industrial wastes due to lack of stringent regulations in the latter. The advanced countries tend to exploit the natural and human capital of these countries to meet their own ends. Hence, at low levels of development, the pollution in a country is higher than at higher levels of development. The Environmental Kuznets curve is another related concept which put forth the often debated idea, that as a country’s income or GDP increases, it’s environmental degradation initially increases at a rapid rate. After a certain per capita GDP level, the environmental degradation falls.
The following graph depicts this phenomenon
Replacement of fossil fuels by various sources of renewable energy or rather replacing non renewable with renewable sources of energy was also suggested by Daly in his famous “operational principles” for achieving sustainability. He said that in each time period , invest sufficient amount of the income from extracting the resource in renewable substitutes, and make only the residual available to fund current consumption. A sufficient level of investment here is one which will ensure that by the time the non renewable resource is exhausted, a renewable substitute is available. This renewable substitute must have the same productive capacity as the non renewable substitute did at the time extraction started. This proposal is however, difficult to implement in practice since it involves forecasting when the non renewable resource will be exploited and how quickly a renewable substitute can be developed. For some non renewable resources, it may be hard with current technology to imagine a renewable substitute.
Another major challenge is to expand the amount of renewable energy in the supply system. On the global scale, less than fifteen per cent of the primary energy supply is renewable energy and the major part is hydropower and wood fuel in developing countries. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar constitute a very small share of the total supply but the potential is substantial. In some regions, the share of renewable energy has grown substantially.
