Chapter 1 Our Common Journey

1. Chapter 1Our Common Journey

2. Ch 1. Contents • Sustainable Development: Common Concerns, Differing Emphases • What Is To Be Sustained • What Is To Be Developed • The Links Between • For How Long? • Sustainable Development: The First Decade • Environment and Development • Funds and Financing • The View from Below • Knowledge* and Know-How** • Goals for a Sustainability Transition • Meeting Human Needs • Providing Food and Nutrition • Nurturing Children • Finding Shelter • Providing an Education • Finding Employment • Targets for Meeting Human Needs • Preserving Life Support Systems • Ensuring the Quality and Supply of Fresh Water • Controlling Emissions into the Atmosphere • Protecting the Oceans • Maintaining Species and Ecosystems • Targets for Preserving Life Support Systems • Reducing Hunger and Poverty • Targets for Reducing Hunger and Poverty • The Transition to Sustainability as Social Learning

3. Key Goals and Questions • "Sustainable development"—the reconciliation of society's developmental goals with its environmental limits over the long term • SD attempts to reconcile the real conflicts between economy and environment and between the present and the future • There is agreement that SD is "to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.“ • However, key differences in the specific issues: • what is to be sustained • what is to be developed • how should sustained and developed entities be linked • what is the extent of the future envisioned

4. Development-Sustainability Consumption-Environment • While Population growth rates continue to decline, the number of people living in poverty has increased. • While globalization has presented new opportunities for sustainable development, the income inequality between the richest and poorest countries have all increased. • While some countries have significantly reduced pollution and slowed resource depletion, the state of the global environment has continued to deteriorate.

5. Goals for a Sustainability Transition • The approach to managing SD is partly captured in the metaphor of Compass and Gyroscope. • Science can provide compass direction, while the gyroscope of politics can maintain some steadiness of course across often-uncharted seas. • In light of the trends of population growth, consumption, .. and environmental stress, a sustainability transition (ST) appears necessary. • ‘The goals of ST over the next two generations should be to meet the needs of a much larger but stabilizing human population, to sustain the life support systems of the planet, and to substantially reduce hunger and poverty’. • Preserving life support system will include • Ensuring the Quality and Supply of Fresh Water • Controlling Emissions into the Atmosphere • Protecting the Oceans • Maintaining Species and Ecosystems

6. Learning, Knowledge and Know-how • Successfully navigating the transition lies in conceptualizing sustainable development as a process of social learning and adaptive response amid turbulence and surprise. • There is little guidance on how to identify and create the knowledge and know-how for SD. • * Knowledge [Webster's Dict.].. the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association...or the acquaintance with or understanding of a science, art, or technique." • ** Know-how here refers to the Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary definition, "knowledge [conveyed by expertise] of how to do something smoothly and efficiently."