In Quest of Sustainable Development

World leaders met in Johannesburg in late August 2002 to review progress in implementing outputs of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro a decade earlier. They were also asked by the Untied Nations General Assembly "to reinvigorate global commitments to sustainable development". The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), however, faced a seemingly impossible task. In order to be endorsed by UNCED as an overarching global goal, the term "sustainable development" had to be sufficiently ambiguous to accommodate many widely differing interpretations. Participants had conflicting interest divergent perceptions, unique historical and environmental contexts as well as often incommensurable values. The Johannesburg Summit provided an opportunity to highlight several of the conflictive political economy issues behind recent unsustainable processes. This paper attempts to contribute to debates about possible policies to ameliorate them by a brief review of research into the social dynamics of environmental change.Contradictory trends Several worrisome global environmental trends have been well documented and widely publicized. Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities continue to accumulate in the atmosphere contributing to unwanted climate change. Biodiversity necessary for maintaining Earth's life support system is being eroded at unprecedented rates. The world's remaining tropical forests are rapidly shrinking. Soil erosion threatens to degrade much needed agricultural land. Marine and coastal ecosystems are being degraded and ocean fisheries are endangered. Fresh water stress threatens livelihoods in many regions. This listing of environmental woes could be endlessly extended. Optimists can cite several apparent more positive global trends. Depletion of the atmospheric ozone level has been vastly slowed. Metropolitan air and water pollution have been slowed or reversed in several high-income countries. Environmental gains by rich countries, however, have been accompanied by increased environmental degradation in poor ones. Unsustainable patters of production, consumption and waste disposal in rich countries are driving environmental damage and social polarization in poor ones as their impacts are transmitted through trade, finance, various forms of compulsion and a host of other mechanisms. Recent global environmental and socioeconomic trends have been mixed, but in many respects threatening for the kind of sustainable development envisioned by the Brundtland Commission and the Earth Summit. Global post-1950 economic growth (as conventionally measured) slowed significantly after the 1970s. This fall was most pronounced for low - and middle-income counties of African and Latin America. This was partially offset in global averages by continued rapid growth in low-income East Asian countries with large populations such as China. Of more concern for sustainable development than rates of GDP growth, however, is the quality of growth. Modern production-consumption patters appear to be increasingly non-sustainable both socially and environmentally. The rate of global population growth has been slowing and world population was projected to stabilize at about 9 or 10 billion people by the end of the twenty-first century. But increasing per capita production and waste is threatening life-supporting natural ecosystems everywhere.