Sustainable Development: Meaning and Principles

The concerns raised in the previous two sections — degradation caused by growth, and the physical limits on resource use — led directly to the idea that development itself needs to be redefined so it does not undermine its own future. This section develops that idea: sustainable development.

The Brundtland definition

The most widely used and internationally accepted definition of sustainable development comes from the 1987 report Our Common Future, prepared by the World Commission on Environment and Development (popularly called the Brundtland Commission after its chair, Gro Harlem Brundtland). It defines sustainable development as development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." This single sentence embeds two distinct ideas of fairness:

1. Intra-generational equity — meeting the needs of the present generation fairly, in particular ensuring that the basic needs of the poor, who are given overriding priority in the Brundtland report's own wording, are actually met, not merely that aggregate output rises.
2. Inter-generational equity — not so depleting resources or degrading ecosystems today that future generations inherit a diminished capacity to meet their own needs — the same underlying concern raised by the resource-depletion and limits-to-growth debate in the previous section.

Core principles of sustainable development

A small set of principles has come to guide how sustainable development is applied in practice, both internationally and in Indian environmental law and policy:

• The Precautionary Principle — where an activity raises a credible threat of serious or irreversible environmental harm, the lack of full scientific certainty about the exact extent of that harm should not be used as a reason to postpone reasonable, cost-effective measures to prevent it. This shifts the burden away from waiting for conclusive proof of damage before acting, precisely because some environmental harm (species extinction, climate tipping points) cannot be undone once it occurs.
• The Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) — the party responsible for causing pollution should bear the cost of the resulting environmental damage and of the measures needed to control or remedy it, rather than passing that cost on to the public or to the environment itself. This is essentially the policy expression of 'internalising the externality' introduced earlier in this chapter: by making the polluter pay a cost equal to the harm caused, PPP aligns private cost with true social cost.
• Principle of inter-generational equity — treated above as embedded in the Brundtland definition, and often stated separately in legal and policy documents as its own guiding principle.
• Principle of sustainable use — natural resources, particularly renewable ones, should be used at a rate that does not exceed their capacity for regeneration, echoing the renewable-resource discussion of the previous section.

The three pillars of sustainable development …