Why Sustainable Development Needs to be Re-defined
The original definition of sustainable development is about meeting the needs of future generations. We need to start thinking about current ones.
Our Common Future, commonly known as the Brundtland Commission report released in 1987, remains one of the foundational documents in advocating for sustainable development. The report defines sustainable development as follows:
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
It conveyed an emotional urgency and request that we must use only what is necessary and protect resources and the environment for our children. While the definition survived over 35 years, I feel it needs to be changed. I was born just before the release of the report, so I was the future generation from the report’s perspective. However, being in my mid-thirties now and part of the present generation, I am worried about my own present and future, not that of future generations.
We are living in unprecedented times. While past environmental disasters were limited to small geographies, the current problems are global. In the past few years, we have all noticed a significant increase in the number and/or intensities of global environmental disasters. 2022 has been a remarkable year in terms of the number of environmental disasters around the world. I suspect there is any country that did not suffer from any extreme weather event in the last two years, which seems truly historic.
Climate change has already arrived in the present and will only get worse (as it has been for decades). We have crossed numerous environmental boundaries, which indicates that we have burdened essential ecosystem services beyond their carrying capacity. Carrying capacity refers to the maximum environmental burden we can impose on the ecosystem beyond which the damages could be irreversible. Scientists have recently claimed that we are dangerously close to crossing many tipping points, which implies irreversible environmental changes for the worse.
This highlights that the victims of climate change are no longer only future generations. It is past as well as present (our parents/grandparents) generations too. And to be honest, I don’t care about future or past generations as much as I do about my own life. We all need to save our asses first before thinking about recently born or yet-to-be-born children.
Therefore, I strongly believe that we need to delete the word generation in the definition of sustainable development and replace it with time to evoke the urgency to save our present and future rather than the present and future of our kids. We must adopt a long-term view for selfish reasons rather than to protect an abstract idea of future generations. The revised definition could be as follow:
Sustainable development is development that meets your present needs without compromising your ability to meet your future needs.
Given our shortsightedness in making decisions, if we look only a decade ahead in our lives — no need to go beyond that — to protect our own interests, we might be able to take climate change more seriously. A decade or even less is what we have left before it is too late to reverse the worse effects of climate change.
