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Why sustainable development?
The past 20 years have seen a growing realisation that the current model of development is unsustainable.
Our way of life is placing an increasing environmental burden on the planet through:
- the consequences of already unavoidable climate change
- increasing stress on resources and environmental systems from the way we produce, consume and waste resources
- increasing loss of biodiversity, from the rainforest to fish stocks.
We are also living in a world where over a billion people live on less than a dollar a day, more than 800 million are malnourished, and over two and a half billion lack access to adequate sanitation. A world disfigured by poverty and inequality is unsustainable.
Unless we reconcile these contradictions, we face a less certain and less secure future. We need to make a decisive move towards more sustainable development both because it is the right thing to do, and because it is in our long-term best interests.
Updated: 31 March 2010
