What is the Importance of Sustainable Development?

By Abby Rabinowitz

Sustainable development refers to the goal of providing a secure future for the coming generations by respecting Earth’s resources.

The main goals pertaining to sustainable development are outlined by the United Nations 17 sustainable development goals and covers a wide range of issues. Currently, we are consuming resources at such a fast pace that future generations are being put at major risk. The Bible tells us not to sacrifice our children in the book of Leviticus, yet by failing to protect our natural resources we are sacrificing our children’s future.

Sustainable development aims to combat this risk by mobilizing people to change their actions in a way that will provide a safe sustainable future for the coming generations.

The Importance of Sustainable Development Explained

Sustainability is about ensuring that future generations will have access to clean air, water, food security and other resources necessary for their quality of life. The United Nations defined sustainable development in the Brundtland Report as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Sustainability is the ability to exist and develop without depleting natural resources for the future.

Today we are using about 40% more resources every year than we can put back, an alarmingly high and unsustainable amount. However, sustainable development encompasses more than just the environment as it also includes the overall health of out society. It requires studying the consequences of the actions people are taking today, and finding ways to improve these outcomes.

The Three Pillars of Sustainable Development

In 2005 at the World Summit on Sustainable Development three core areas in relation to sustainability were highlighted: social needs, economic issues, and the environment. These became known as the three “pillars” of sustainability. They were created to serve as the basic guidelines and groups to address various core problems. The summit agreed to address its goals by catering towards current needs in all three categories, without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Later, in 2015, at the United Nations sustainable development summit, the UN adopted 17 sustainable development goals as part of a larger 15 year plan to achieve sustainability by 2030. These 17 goals can be split into three main categories:

Social goals: including no poverty, zero hunger, good health & well being, quality education, gender equality, reduced inequalities, peace justice & strong institutions, and partnerships for the goals

Economic goals: including decent work and economic growth, industry innovation and infrastructure, sustainable cities & communities, and responsible consumption & production.

Environmental goals: including clean water & sanitation, affordable & clean energy, climate action, life below water, and life on land.

What is Preventing Sustainable Development?

There are two major issues that block the sustainable development process.

First, creating and maintaining sustainable alternatives is far more expensive than the current infrastructure. People are much less likely to invest in sustainable options such as clean energy, because it is more cost efficient to use coal or natural gas.

The second issue, is that irresponsible development doesn’t provide an imminent threat, but rather a long term danger towards future generations, which de-incentivizes immediate action.

The Importance of Environmental Sustainable Development

In 2015 the UN launched its agenda on sustainability. In order to achieve sustainability, the issues facing our environment need to be solved. To do so however, important steps need to be made to change human practices. For example, dis-investing from fossil fuels, reducing carbon emissions, and finding renewable resources as alternatives. In December of 2015, The Paris Agreement was signed by 197 countries.

This is a legally binding treaty which addresses climate change. The Paris Agreement aims to improve the global response to climate change threats by ensuring that the global temperature rise will be well below 1.5 / 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. New attempts to experiment with renewable energy sources such as solar energy or wind energy have been developed. They provide clean alternatives to non-renewable resources, create thousands of new jobs and are a strong first step in protecting our planet!

In addition to the Paris Accords, it is key that people take action on their own and support environmentally friendly options. Additionally, not only are environmental issues important goals of their own, but they are also contributing to problems within public health, water insecurity, food insecurity and many other pervasive issues.

For example, according to the World Health Organization, “1 in 3 people globally do not have access to safe drinking water”. Clean Water and Sanitation, which is the 6th of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, is a major issue which is affecting over a billion people.

Additionally, peoples current abuse of our environment has led to a dramatic decrease in air quality. Practicing environmental protection will not only dramatically improve the health of our environment, but it will also be able to improve our quality of life in many other ways.

Economic Sustainable Development

Moreover, by introducing sustainable thinking into society, we can impact societal values in a way that helps bend the curve toward sustainability. Consumers are now becoming conscious about sustainable products. While some companies only care about profitability will nevertheless disregard this changing sentiment, others may change their consumption and production habits to be environmentally friendly and sustainable in order to appeal to customers.

Interestingly, sustainability can also be economically sound. While it might cost more to manufacture products adhering to sustainable principles, businesses such as Tesla and KIND Bar have already found that customers are willing to pay for sustainable products. In addition, sustainable practices often are less costly that wasteful production practices. These results prove that sustainable economic growth can be achieved without compromising a companies success.

The Social Aspect of Sustainable Development

A key piece of the concept of sustainable development is how we relate to social issues. Currently, we are failing to meet the basic needs of peoples in terms of education, clean water & sanitation, poverty, gender equality and much more.

Typically, these issues are more common in developing countries that do not have the resources to prioritize these social issues, which are often viewed as less threatening than economic or environmental threats. These pervasive issues have consistently been ignored and continue to grow in urgency. In order to achieve true sustainability, they must be addressed.

Reaching Sustainable Development

An important aspect of sustainability is the recognition that we cannot simply achieve sustainability overnight by immediately terminating activities that pollute or are not sufficiently energy efficient. What we can do is ensure that new projects, factories, cars and buildings placed into service take sustainable goals into account.

Therefore, over the longer term, as we phase in new, sustainable modalities and technology, we will achieve sustainability in two critical ways – we will prevent new environmentally unfriendly activities from taking place and we will also replace older environmentally unfriendly activities with sustainable ones.

If we consider the useful life of a given asset – suppose a car has a 15 year useful life – if all new cars were engineered for sustainability, we could reasonably expect that 15 years from now, the entire global stock of cars would meet sustainability parameters.

The same could be applied to power plants; if we were to only build sustainable plants, even without forced retirements of coal and gas plants, we would eventually achieve the goal of sustainability.

These examples further clarify the importance of sustainability in that we will either remain on a destructive path that utilizes 40% more resources than can be replaced, or begin to bend the curve toward a breakeven or point of neutrality in which we are no longer stealing environmental capacity from the future.

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