Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development is most widely defined, per the Brundtland Commission's report, as: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

This definition contains two ideas at once:

1. Development must address genuine present needs — sustainability is not an argument against development itself.
2. Development must not be pursued in a way that permanently depletes or degrades the resources and environmental quality that future generations will need.

Why it is needed: if a generation consumes and pollutes without limit, it leaves the next generation with fewer resources, a degraded environment, and a smaller base on which to build its own development — economic growth achieved this way is not genuinely sustained, since it eventually runs into the very resource and environmental limits it ignored. …