Sustainable Development Essay

Introduction

The concept of living within the ecological boundaries of the Earth means that we have to use natural resources in a sustainable way, this means that these resources should not be used to the point where their threshold is exceeded and they become depleted. Although this is the case, we also have to look at this from a social point of view. We cannot live within our ecological boundaries if the world’s population is living under the social foundation. In other words, we need to use the world’s resources in a way that they are sustained, while still providing the world’s population with basic living needs, this is essentially sustainable development (Raworth, 2012). Sustainable development is an attempt to combine environmental issues with socio-economic issues (Hopwood et al., 2005), this therefore encompasses the ideas of ecological boundaries and a solid social foundation.

Sustainable development

Sustainability was first looked at because of concerns about environmental degradation due to the poor management of resources. With an increased interest in the world and its environment; sustainability became an important goal to achieve (McKenzie, 2004). At first, sustainability was looked at from only the ecological perspective but this is no longer the case (Dempsey, 2011). Sustainability is about the movement in social institutions towards more equity in the way of meeting the needs within and between generations (Hirsch Hadorn, 2006).

The concept of sustainable development has been built around the idea of three ‘pillars’, these being the ecological, economic and social pillars (Lehtonen, 2004). The IUCN’s 1980 World Conservation Strategy stated that “for development to be sustainable it must take account of social...

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...future benefits of the operation (Klauer, 1999). Many people have different ideas about sustainability polices due to the conflicting ideas of what justice is, this could be due to different economic statuses, cultural differences etc. This therefore means that there must be much deliberation and common ground must be found when building sustainable policies (Hirsch Hadorn, 2006).

Conclusion

We can conclude that the statement ‘as we seek to live within the ecological boundaries of our planet, it is essential that we ensure that there are solid social foundations for our action’ is a very true statement. We cannot live within ecological boundaries unless the world’s population has basic human needs. This is essentially living sustainably and in order to do this we have to give value and limits to the nine ecological boundaries and to the eleven social foundations.