The global problem

The report of the 1987 Brundtland Commission, ‘Our Common Future’, spoke of the “environmental trends that threaten to radically alter the planet [and] threaten the lives of many species upon it, including the human species.”   The Commission observed that:

The planet is passing through a period of dramatic growth  and fundamental change.  Our human world of 5 billion must make room in a finite environment for another human world.  The population could stabilize at between 8 billion and 14 billion sometime next century.  ...These related changes have locked the global economy and global ecology together in new ways.  We have in the past been concerned about the impacts of economic growth upon the environment.  We are now forced to concern ourselves with the impacts of ecological stress – degradation of soils, water regimes, atmosphere and forests – upon our economic prospects.  We have in the more recent past been forced to face up to a sharp increase in economic interdependence among nations.  We are now forced to accustom ourselves to an accelerating ecological interdependence among nations.  Ecology and economy are becoming ever more interwoven – locally, regionally, and globally – into a seamless net of causes and effects.

....we must take bold and unequivocal action; we must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization.  Whether we realize it or not, we are now engaged in an epic battle to right the balance of our earth, and the tide of this battle will turn only when the majority of people in the world become sufficiently aroused by a shared sense of urgent danger to join in an all-out effort...  Adopting a central organizing principle – one agreed to voluntarily – means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action – to use, in short, every means to halt the destruction of the environment and to preserve and nurture our ecological system.

The Brundtland Report introduced the concept of ‘sustainable development’ which has become one of the principal goals of the international community in the 1990s.  Sustainable development it defined as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” There are, in the Report’s view, limits to economic growth, but not the ‘absolute limits’ whose theoretical existence was proposed and vigorously debated in the 1970s.  Instead, the Report notes the more elastic limitations “imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities,” not a ‘fixed state of harmony’ but rather a ‘process of change’

Those ‘elastic limitations’ will depend henceforth on restoring a natural equilibrium to Earth, a harmonious balance between environmental integrity and the developmental aspirations of humanity.  Environment and development, the twin focus of the two Earth Summits in 1992 and 1997, are two sides of the same coin – attaining the objective an enduring equilibrium with Earth – global sustainability in all human activities, with an optimal relationship between population size and economic activity.

The global objective for the environment, therefore, is the restoration of Earth’s environment in the two areas that currently threaten the vital planetary interest: ozone depletion and climate change.  The strategy to achieve that goal is through two legal instruments: the Vienna Framework Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer and its Montreal Protocol with revision; and the Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol.

                                        Ozone Depletion                               Climate Change

Back to Subject Matter

Return to Home Page