EDITORIAL

The Challenges of Sustainable Development

The challenges of sustainable development loom larger today than ever before. Recently, a floating province of ice, the size of Rhode Island, broke apart from the ice shelf of Antarctica and collapsed into pieces. Thirty years after the Stockholm Conference and ten years after Rio, the world is still confronted with worsening global trends related to environmental degradation like global warming, loss of biodiversity, land degradation and air and water pollution-according to new findings by UNEP in an overview report prepared on the basis of 22 global sustainability reports.

The worsening trends are posing ever bigger threats not just to the quality of life, but to the sustainability of development itself. Population growth and consumption patterns are over-stretching the natural resources, including freshwater, in all continents.  Most of all, across the continents, poverty, with all its degrading manifestations, remain intractable. Almost half of the world’s six billion people live on less than $2 a day, of which almost 1.2 billion subsist on less than $1 a day. The ratio of the per capita GDP of affluent countries to that of poorer countries has grown from 3:1 in 1820 to 30:1 in 1970 to 74:1 at the end 1999. An unimaginable human tragedy is now unfolding in Africa in the form of HIV/AIDS pandemic, threatening to devastate the very foundations of sustainability of its societies. The setbacks in the developing world are mired by the complexities of a new intractable phenomenon: globalization. Seen from a development perspective, so far its net effect has been that capital is moving in the wrong direction. IMF data shows, 2001 is the second year in a row when there has been a net outflow of capital from the developing countries to support consumption of the developed countries. High barriers to their exports cost the developing countries $130 billion a year, on top of which the ‘debt-trap’ is overwhelming many of them. In the sustainability context, all these concerns are integrally linked with each other.

The experience over the last thirty years has shown that sustainability must be the overarching umbrella to address the issues of developmental concern. It has also shown that addressing the core issues of poverty to eliminate the root causes is the most fundamental of the tasks that must be effectively carried out. But, the challenge for the Johannesburg Summit goes even beyond: to set the global community on course to secure sustainable development for all, namely for present and future generations.

This huge responsibility can only be addressed in a comprehensive setting, through partnerships and networking at the country level, as well as regionally and globally. The challenge poses vast new responsibilities in terms of governance at all levels that no single organization or civic group can fulfill. The United Nations and its outreach organizations at different levels, including the regional commissions in their respective regions, can and must serve as catalysts in that great global endeavour.