In February 2024, international news channels announced that global temperature rises for the past year had passed 1.5 degrees Celsius, which should have been avoided. This particular development indicates the earth's enormous challenges in terms of sustainable development. For the first time in history, humans are on the verge of irreparably damaging the planet they live on. The world took note of the environmental challenge more than half a century ago and has engaged in multilateral environmental agreements. The United Nations has taken a lead in this regard. This chapter highlights the progress in tackling environmental issues, with particular attention paid to UN agencies.
For better or worse, humans or our descendants will be responsible for life on Earth for the indefinite future. Despite the initially daunting technical challenges, the biggest obstacle to compassionate stewardship of the world’s free-living nonhuman animal population is not technical or even financial but ideological.-David Pearce
TopIntroduction
No one can escape complexity. Focusing on the biosphere, the tissue of living organisms that cover the earth, countless plants and animals, leads to a relatively simple existence. Complexity emerges from the interactions between organisms, from their interdependence and diversity. The biosphere we study in detail today is not static; it has been evolving for four billion years. The sociopolitical system built by men and women is similar. Our daily actions are mostly simple, but from their accumulation emerges a complex system, constantly evolving, which we often struggle to pilot. However, evidence accumulates that actions are not without consequences, neither for nature nor us. From this awareness emerged the concept of development, which is sustainable, as a timely solution.
Sustainable development is also a common complex subject if only because it calls for consultation between social, political, economic and scientific stakeholders along trajectories that must be curved for the benefit of all, including those Groucho Marx identified as those who have done nothing for us: future generations. What are the elements that each of us should know? To be born and to understand how to participate actively in debates and actions for a transition towards sustainable development.
Guided by such a question and endeavour, this chapter intends to take up one by one the basic concepts of the surrounding mental, social and economic issues linked to development without eliminating the diversity of discussions and debates and the complexity of the issues. The central aspect of this problem, the question of the limits to growth, has resurfaced in the form of scientific results which make it possible to establish nine functional boundaries of the planetary system, the transgression of which leads to marked dysfunctions which may be irreversible. In such a time, the international community has adopted new goals to integrate these constraints within the actions of municipalities aiming to overcome poverty and global inequality (Yigit, 2024). All these challenges cannot be left only to the experts. Each citizen of the world has a role to play. The hope is that additions to the academic literature will be an additional source of motivation for commitment to sustainability.
This chapter will focus on the major international environmental measures and developments that took place in the 1970s, culminating in the momentous event in September 2015, whereby 193 member countries of the United Nations adopted the development program for 2015-2030 by consensus, which underscored 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets (Sachs, 2015). This was followed by the Paris Agreement, adopted in December of the same year, which concerned all countries and aimed to contain the rise in the planet's average temperature to be clearly below 2 degrees centigrade. Together, these tools expressed the will of the states promising cooperation on a multilateral basis to research solutions. This is significant when viewed from a context of crises and continuing tensions.
The concept of sustainable development is familiar to many, as many organisations promote it, and it is the subject of laws and governmental institutions in several countries (Pietrzak, 2022). Perhaps most notably, Gro Harlem Brundtland is largely associated with it. As the Global Commission on the Environment and Development President in 1987, she defined sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Hajian & Kashani, 2021).
Two concepts are inherent in this notion:
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The concept of needs, And more particularly of the essential needs of the most deprived, to whom it is appropriate to grant priority,
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The idea of the limitations that the state of our techniques and our social organisation imposes on the capacity of the Environment to meet current needs.