1 Introduction to the Concept of Sustainable Development

Introduction

The aim of this unit is to provide an introduction to sustainable development that includes a general approach to thinking sustainably. It introduces the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and a review of the principles and practices of sustainability that can be applied individually or in a local community.

Before we begin to delve into the topic, read the talk by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, given on World Environment Day, 5 June 2024 on "A Moment of Truth."

Discussion

1. One way to start thinking about the future and sustainability is to imagine the world you would like to live in. Projecting your goals and aspirations to create a scenario of your ideal future can help to make your beliefs and vision more explicit, and sharing this vision with others can launch an interesting and enriching dialogue. What is your vision of an ideal world where sustainability is an integral part?
2. What is the goal of sustainable development?
3. How do the Sustainable Development Goals reflect spiritual principles?
4. Why do you think it has been so hard to put sustainable development into practice?
5. What does sustainable development mean for your own lifestyle and community?

As you read the documents shared in this unit, consider the topics below for discussion.

The Concept of Sustainable Development

To sustain means to support for a prolonged period or to keep an effort going continuously. With reference to development, sustainability means to maintain the productivity and wealth of our society into the distant future. Yet no past civilization has done this successfully; all reached environmental or social limits and collapsed. Now, with the rapid evolution of science and technology, humanity has for the first time run up against planetary limits, and we have little time left to change course before catastrophic events from climate change and famine to mass migrations and wanton corruption, and the resulting political instability, become unbearable.

A major problem is with the present economic system, with its materialistic values and focus on increasing profits and return on capital, rather than achieving any higher human purpose or ensuring well-being for everyone on the planet. For long it ignored the environment as an externality. However, as the costs of environmental damage grew, it has been forced to acknowledge that there are environmental and social factors that must be considered.

Watch: Sustainability – A History by Jeremy L. Caradonna, 5min.

This video provides an excellent history of the philosophical concept of sustainability.

As the warning signs increased in past decades, first the environment and then the broader concept of sustainable development rose on the international agenda. However, we have a hard time defining what sustainable development really is. It is, in fact, easier to measure un-sustainability and to try to reduce unsustainable trends. The beginnings of global environmental concern were reflected in the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972.

Reading 1: Quick Guide to Sustainable Development: History and Concepts (4 pages)

This document provides a short history of the international movement for sustainable development, which has been punctuated by environmental crises, conferences, legal agreements, and reports.

Watch: A Historical View of Sustainable Development 6:14 min.

The video provides a quick overview of the role played the United Nations with regard to sustainable development in the last seventy years.

The concept of sustainable development was defined and put on the international agenda by a World Commission created by the United Nations and chaired by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. Its report is still one of the best descriptions of the need for and definition of sustainable development.

Reading 2: World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland) 1987: Our Common Future (9 pages)

Read: Overview: part I, paragraphs 1-39, which includes a definition of sustainable development. Scroll down to see the first paragraphs.

This report led to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where over 100 Heads of State and Government gathered, in what became known as the Rio Earth Summit, to adopt a declaration, action plan, and international conventions on climate change and biological diversity.

The Rio Declaration contains the principles that all the nations agreed to provide the basis for sustainable development. The Action Plan, called Agenda 21, contains 40 chapters of detailed recommendations for how to achieve sustainable development. Implementing Agenda 21 has been a major responsibility of the international community since 1992, and it is still a foundation for action today. However, the principal focus was still on environmental problems, and it did not have much impact on those who consider the economy most important.

Ten years after Rio, government leaders gathered in Johannesburg in 2002 at the World Summit on Sustainable Development to review their progress and to define further concrete steps and targets for achieving sustainable development. They recognized that these targets must include the reduction of poverty in the world, giving sustainable development a more economic and social focus.

Twenty years after the Rio Earth Summit and 40 years after the Stockholm Conference, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development was held in Rio de Janeiro on 4-6 June 2012. Its two main themes were the green economy and international institutional arrangements for sustainable development. It reaffirmed former commitments, strengthened UNEP, agreed to a High-Level Political Forum to replace the Commission on Sustainable Development, and launched a process to define Sustainable Development Goals for all countries for the period post-2015. These goals were adopted in September 2015 at a summit at the United Nations in New York, as the latest definition of what sustainable development means and how to achieve it. They have set the international agenda to 2030.

Sustainable Development Goals

There are 17 Sustainable Development Goals with 169 targets, and about 240 indicators to measure progress towards these targets. The 17 goals are:
1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere
2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture
3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote life-long learning opportunities for all
5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all
8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
10. Reduce inequality within and among countries
11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development: Finance, Technology, Capacity-building, Trade, Systemic issues: Policy and institutional coherence, multi-stakeholder partnerships; data, monitoring and accountability

The Sustainable Development Goals – Action Towards 2030. 5:52
This video is a concise summary of this unit's content.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Summit: 17 Goals to Transform Our World 3:30 This video provides some glimpses of the UN Conference and its proceedings. LINK TO VIDEO https://vimeo.com/151435077

The UN Secretary-General issued a Synthesis Report on the Post-2015 agenda which illustrates the high aspirations that the world community is setting itself. However government action will not be enough. The organizations of civil society, business, communities and individuals need to take these goals to heart and work at their own levels to implement them.

Reading 3: Synthesis Report of the Secretary-General (2014), paragraphs 1-35, 46-86, 131-132, and 157-161 (~19 pages in total. Please, note that the indicated numbers do not refer to pages, but to paragraphs!)

The 2030 Agenda was completed by the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in December 2015, ratified and in force already in 2016. However, alongside these efforts at integration, the forces of disintegration are battling to defend national sovereignty and vested interests, fear is being used to manipulate populations and undermine democracy, and populist and xenophobic movements are attacking the oneness of humankind. How do we stay on the side of the progressive forces in the world, when so many currents are in the opposite direction? Understanding sustainable development can provide positive starting points for meaningful conversations about the ultimate solutions to so many of today's problems, and the spiritual transformation that can make change possible.

On 18 September 2023, the UN General Assembly adopted a declaration to accelerate the SDGs. https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/09/1140857

Each goal contains targets, with 169 overall, but Mr. Guterres warned that currently only 15 per cent are on track, while many are going in reverse.

He said the political declaration "can be a game-changer in accelerating SDG progress."

It includes a commitment to financing for developing countries and clear support for his proposal for an SDG Stimulus of at least $500 billion annually, as well as an effective debt-relief mechanism.

It further calls for changing the business model of multilateral development banks to offer private finance at more affordable rates for developing countries, and endorses reform of the international finance architecture which he has labelled "outdated, dysfunctional and unfair."

Progress on SDGs is being monitored on SDG tracking: https://ourworldindata.org/sdgs

Some indicators are green but many are red in the 2022 UN SDG progress chart: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2022/Progress-Chart-2022.pdf

"The Progress Chart 2022 clearly demonstrates the deterioration of progress towards many targets, such as poverty, food security, ending the epidemic of malaria, immunization coverage, and employment, caused by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and conflict. Recent cascading crises have magnified the challenges of achieving the SDGs. Urgent, scaled-up and coordinated actions by all countries are needed to accelerate SDG implementation and avert the devastating impacts in order to get on track and chart a course for better recovery. "

According to the SDG 2023 report, the impacts of the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, a weak global economy, and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have revealed weaknesses and hindered progress towards the Goals. The report further warns that while lack of progress is universal, it is the world’s poorest and most vulnerable who are experiencing the worst effects of these unprecedented global challenges. It also points out areas that need urgent action to rescue the SDGs and deliver meaningful progress for people and the planet by 2030.

In summary, sustainable development is often described as having three dimensions: economic, social, and environmental, which all must be in balance and integrated to achieve sustainability. There is still debate about the short- and long-term perspectives of sustainable development. We do know that sustainability is about the dynamics of society, that it is more about processes than goals, and that it requires the integration of the whole system in what is called a systems perspective. Most critically, the concept of sustainable development includes an ethical component, in that it requires justice for all the peoples of the world today and for future generations, leaving no one behind.

Despite more than 40 years of effort, the world is still going in unsustainable directions, and we are reaching planetary boundaries that threaten our future. In general we know what we need to do, but we lack the motivation and political will to make the necessary transformation. One approach to such seemingly intractable problems is to search for and apply the relevant spiritual principles. This will be the central theme of this course. There are many quotations from the Bahá'í Writings and statements of the Bahá'í International Community that provide useful guidance on sustainable development. Now is the time to start experimenting, at home and in our local communities, on the application of these spiritual principles to the practical problems we face, and achieving local progress towards equity and sustainability.

Reading 4: Bahá'í Quotations on Environment and Sustainable Development, Opening section: Spiritual Principles (first 3 paragraphs in the compilation)

While sustainable development was originally adopted as a goal at the global level and governments are trying to apply it at the national level, its principles are equally relevant at the local community level and in our individual lives, although the applications often differ from level to level. The Global Solidarity Conversations and Accounting - a community Approach gives a good introduction to the multiple dimensions of sustainability at the local level, including the spiritual dimension.

Browse: Global Solidarity Conversations and Accounting - A Community Approach Only read the main page. We will come back to the Global Solidarity Conversations in Unit 4.

Resources for Unit 1

At the end of each unit you will find a link to a supplementary resource trove. This is rather a place where we have added extra materials for you to browse if you are so inclined. Baha'i participants may also be interested in a compilation of Baha'i guidance on Participation in Public Discourse.

Resources for Unit 1

Go to Unit 2