Skip to main content

Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development

Introduction

Development is something that is done for the betterment or well-being of the society. The word sustainable derived from a Latin root sus-tinere, which means to "under-hold" or hold up from underneath. It means durability over time.

History

The concept of Sustainable Development was first presented by the Brundtland Commission in 1987. This commission was initially known as the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). It was held to realize and stop the destruction of environment and its further impacts on human health. This commission defined Sustainable Development as "Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." This definition explained sustainable development as a development that is done to meet the needs of current generation but not compromising the resources of future generations to meet their needs. Later on this commission led  to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development 1992 (UNCED). It is commonly known as Earth summit that was held in Rio de Janeiro. This conference presented an action plan called Agenda 21 adopted by 178 nations that attended the conference. This action plan was to preserve environment along with sustaining economic growth and social development.
Sustainable development is basically a broader view of development that includes an integrated frame work of economy, environment, and society. Older view about development was that there is always a trade-off between economy and environment. Trade-off means to gain economic growth; environment have to be compromised. But the newer version is that their is no trade-off between environment and economy. Economic and environmental development or well-being can be achieved together and the thing that enables them to develop in integration is the concept of innovation.
Innovation is defined as a new idea, product, or method. Innovation leads to economic growth as it helps in efficient production (by the invent of computer-integrated manufacturing), and it also helps in achieving environment friendly production processes and developing environment friendly products (like electric cars).
There are 2 major sectors in a society; private sector and public sector. Private sector contributes a major part in the growth of an economy but it is lead by public sector directly and indirectly mostly. Private sector have less resources as compare to public sector in-terms of financial resources, and infrastructure etc. The public sector provides resources and healthy atmosphere for private sector for doing business activities. Today most of the inventions are done in universities and research centers owned by public sectors. The policies of government authorities provide innovative atmosphere for private businesses and helps in achieving an integrated approach towards development known as Sustainable Development.
(Continued...)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Environmental Campaign in Pakistan

World has been industrializing rapidly as it did in the past as well. We humans realized its consequences pretty late. Environmental change is the biggest threat to the world collectively because of the excessive exploitation. Careless usage of natural resources now took us to the brink of destruction. In the past few decades, we have lost nearly a million species. This for me is the biggest ever loss we have had because we cannot reverse it ever. Along with specie lost, the overall average temperatures have already risen by more than 1.5 degree centigrade. Now we face frequent droughts and the soil fertility has been lost in many parts of the world. Deforestation led to soil erosion and caused threat to poor regions of the world as majority of the population lives near water sources. Due to global warming and greenhouse effects, our cities face frequent attacks of heat island effect and hundreds of lives are lost yearly in most of the poor countries. Concrete structures standing ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Book Review: Kicking Away the Ladder

As the topic suggests, this book holds pretty interesting combination of history, economy and politics. Providing a gist of the entire book in a summarized way is difficult but appealing to do. This book is written by Ha-Joon Chang; he is a South Korean Institutional Economist. Other than that he has a multi-disciplinary background in academia (Economics, politics and development) for writing such a book comprehensively. The main objective of this book is to present the real face of Now Developed Countries (NDCs) and their historical experience about development. The author historically explains how developed countries hide the way they themselves developed, their motives in hiding and what they dictate to developing countries. The author uses secondary sources of data to explain historical perspective. Author defines how industrialization occurred in Britain first and then it was done in other countries afterwards and how different factors helped them in doing so. A detailed histo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pakistani Awam: Remembering Pakistan in Bad Words

Let’s start this with a real life example. Once during a lecture on inequality measuring techniques at my university; teacher had drawn supposedly a graph of unequal society, a student passed a comment “This should be of Pakistan”. Doesn't it shows how we think of our mother land? Pakistan is doing or not doing well as a country is a different story. But here comes a question: Why Pakistan is not doing good in our minds? We from our childhood are sensitized in a way that if a person does anything bad, we relate it to Pakistan; "Pakistani awam". Let's get into the depth of it. I read a quote in a book named "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" by Milan Kundara; You begin to liquidate a people," Hubl said, "by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and wha...
Post a Comment
Read more