Models of Sustainable Development Make the wrong choices now and future generations will live with a changed

climate, depleted resources and without the green space and biodiversity that contribute both to our standard of living and our quality of life. Each of us needs to make the right choices to secure a future that is fairer, where we can all live within our environmental limits. That means sustainable development. Tony Blair Earlier this semester, I made a presentation on sustainable development in our Global Environmental Law and Policy class. I started by providing two definitions of sustainable development. The first one was popularized by the World Commission on the Environment and Development (WCED), frequently referred to as the Brundtland Commission, after Gro Harlem Brundtland, the head of the commission and a former Prime Minister of Norway as well as a previous Director-General of the World Health Organization. It says that sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Our Common Future, 1987). The second definition was from a book jointly published by three environmental organizations: the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). It says that sustainable development is improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems (Caring for the Earth, 1991). This definition emphasizes the carrying capacity of the earth and the quality of human life. Next I shared to the class that at the 2005 World Summit it was noted that sustainability requires the reconciliation of environmental, social, and economic demands the three pillars of sustainability. This view has been expressed as an illustration using three overlapping ellipses indicating that the three pillars of sustainability are not mutually exclusive and can be mutually reinforcing. There are two different levels of sustainability: weak and strong. Proponents of weak sustainability maintain that man-made capital and natural capital are substitutable in the long term while followers of strong sustainability believe they are not. The problem with weak sustainability is that, while we can assign a monetary value to manufactured goods and capital, it can be very difficult to assign a monetary value to natural materials and services. For example, how much is a forest full of trees worth? A value can be calculated if you assume that all the trees are cut down and turned into furniture or paper. However, the forest provides a home for wildlife that provides food for hunters. It also provides a place for hikers to enjoy the natural environment. Weak sustainability does not take into account the fact that some natural material and services cannot be replaced by manufactured goods and services. For example, what is the dollar value of a wetland, an ocean fishery, or a watershed? Strong sustainability is the idea that there are certain functions that the environment performs that cannot be duplicated by humans. The ozone layer is one example of an ecosystem service that is difficult, if not impossible, for humans to duplicate.

The concept of sustainable development was first popularized by the Brundtland Report prepared under the leadership of Gro Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and former DirectorGeneral of the World Health Organization. The Brundtland Report chose to define sustainability not in terms of preserving the environment itself, but the quality of our lives, or the fulfillment of our needs. According to Bartelmus (2008), the Brundtland Report definition of sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs is unclear as it does not specify the categories of human needs and does not give a clear time frame for analysis; nor does it indicate particular roles for the environment or social concerns in long-term development. The term therefore needs to be operationalized, i.e., indicators for and of sustainable development should be established. But the main problem of having lists of indicators is the difficulty of comparing and evaluating indicators expressed in different units of measurement, e.g., the Human Development Index, the Environmental Sustainability Index, the Genuine Progress Indicator and the Ecological Footprint. According to Solow, sustainability is the requirement that the next generation must be left with "whatever it takes to achieve a standard of living at least as good as our own and to look after their next generation similarly." And yet there are problems with this approach to sustainability. First, it is a very anthropocentric concept (but who other than human beings can decide what to sustain?). Second, leaving to our human descendants the ability to be at least as well off as we are ignores current inequities. Daly (1990) then differentiated between the terms sustainable development and sustainable growth. According to the dictionary meaning he adopted, to grow means to increase naturally in size by the addition of material through assimilation or accretion while to develop means to expand or realize the potentialities of; bring gradually to a fuller, greater, or better state. In other words, growth is quantitative increase in physical scale, while development is qualitative improvement or unfolding of potentialities. Therefore, an economy can grow without developing, or develop without growing, or do both or neither. Since the human economy is a subsystem of a finite global ecosystem which does not grow, even though it does develop, it is clear that growth of the economy cannot be sustainable over long periods of time. Daly then recommended that the term sustainable growth should be rejected as a bad oxymoron. The term sustainable development is much more appropriate. But what should be sustained? According to Daly (2005), there are five candidate quantities to be sustained from year to year: GDP, "utility," throughput, natural capital and total capital (the sum of natural and man-made capital). 1. Some economists believe that the rate of growth of GDP should be sustained. But as mentioned earlier, according to Daly this is biophysically impossible. 2. The next candidate is utility, the level of "satisfaction of wants," or level of wellbeing of the population. But for Daly, this definition is useless in practice. Utility is an experience, not a thing. It has no unit of measure and cannot be passed on from one generation to the next. 3. On the other hand, natural resources, are things. They can be measured and bequeathed. In particular, people can measure throughput, or the rate at which the economy uses natural resourcesSustainability can be defined in terms of throughput by determining the

environment's capacity for supplying each raw resource and for absorbing the end waste products. 4. Resources are a form of capital, or wealth, that ranges from stocks of raw materials to finished products and factories. Two broad categories of capital exist: natural and man-made. Most neoclassical economists believe that man-made capital is a good substitute for natural capital and therefore advocate maintaining the sum of the two, an approach called weak sustainability. 5. Most ecological economists, Daly included, believe that natural and man-made capital are more often complements than substitutes and that natural capital should be maintained on its own, because it has become the limiting factor (Daly, 2005; Pearce, 1988). That approach is called strong sustainability. Ekins (1993) has another candidate in mind. For him, environmental functions should be sustained. According to Dasgupta (2003, 2010), sustainable development occurs when well-being per capita is not falling over time. This means that constant well-being equals sustainability, as well as rising well-being. So for Dasgupta, the quality of life should be sustained. In addition, Dasgupta believes that development policies that ignore our reliance on ecological capital are seriously harmful. They dont pass the mildest test for equity among contemporaries, nor among people separated by time and uncertain contingencies. So far, more than 20 twenty years after Our Common Future first popularized the concept of sustainable development, no country has really demonstrated that environmental sustainable development is actually achievable. All countries in the world still have room for improvement. Im looking forward to the new catchphrase economists will introduce in 2012. In 1972, it was limits to growth. In 1992, it was sustainable development. I wonder whats next.

References Adams, W.M. 2006. The Future of Sustainability: Re-thinking Environment and Development in the Twenty-first Century. The World Conservation Union. http://cmsdata.iucn.org/downloads/iucn_future_of_sustanability.pdf Bartelmus, Peter, et al. 2008. Measuring Sustainable Economic Growth and Development. In Encyclopedia of Earth. Ed. Cutler J. Cleveland. Encyclopedia of Earth. http://www.eoearth.org/article/Measuring_sustainable_economic_growth_and_development Daly, Herman. 2008. A Steady-State Economy. Sustainable Development Commission, UK Daly, Herman. 2005. Economics in a Full World. Scientific American 293: Issue 3 Daly, Herman. 1990. Toward Some Operational Principles of Sustainable Development. Ecological Economic 2: 1-6.

Dasgupta, Partha. 2010. The Place of Nature in Economic Development. Handbook of Development Economics 5: 4977-5046 Dasgupta, Partha. 2003. Population, Poverty, and the Natural Environment. In Handbook of Environmental Economics Vol. 1, Eds. K.-G. Mler and J.R. Vincent Ekins, Paul. 1993. Limits to Growth and Sustainable Development: Grappling with Ecological Realities. Ecological Economics 8: 269-288. Ekins, Paul. 2003. Identifying critical natural capital. Ecological Economics 44: 159-163. Pezzey, John. 1992. Sustainable Development Concepts: An Economic Analysis. World Bank Environment Paper No. 2. Washington, DC: World Bank. Pearce, David. 1988. Economics, Equity, and Sustainable Development. Futures: 598-605 Sen, Amartya. Sustainable Development and Human Freedom. Institut Veolia Environnement. http://www.institut.veolia.org/en/documents/CDB0Mg3X1p660TGJErhq.aspx