And the fraction of the world's population living in absolute poverty was lower than it had ever been. By the early twenty-first century more than 80% of the people on Earth had life expectancies higher than those of people in the richest parts of the world as recently as 1950. The first global trend, depicted by Angus Deaton as “the great escape” ( 7), consists of the unprecedented improvements in human health, knowledge, and material well-being that began in the late nineteenth century and accelerated especially in the second half of the twentieth century. These two trends, taken together, have come to be the perplexing and alarming characterization of what many are now calling the Anthropocene System ( 6). The growing concern for making development sustainable has been a response to tensions implicit in two global trends: rapidly increasing human well-being and rapidly increasing environmental degradation.
EVER ANOTHER TOMORROW TESS EVERIS HOW TO
7), “not as patients whose interests have to be looked after, but as agents who can do effective things”-who have the freedom and capacity to participate in setting their own sustainability goals and in choosing how to pursue them. Efforts to promote sustainability also increasingly acknowledge that its pursuit should treat humans, in Amartya Sen's phrase ( 5, p. The challenges of sustainable development today are generally seen in terms that go beyond just meeting basic human needs to embrace a broader vision of sustainability as fairness: enhancing human well-being to more equitably meet the needs of both current and future generations ( 4). Subsequent deliberations in all manner of public forums-from community gatherings to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly-have reaffirmed the Commission's vision but also expanded it. The two are inseparable.…Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable: to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. “Environment” is where we all live and “development” is what we all do in attempting to improve our lot within that abode. That problem was defined a generation ago by the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission) in a prescient statement that merits careful rereading today: Sustainability science, like agricultural science or health science, is an applied science defined by the practical problems it addresses-specifically, the problem of sustainable development ( 2). We aim to provide a manageable overview of the field for scholars seeking to locate their work within the broad enterprise of sustainability science or to catch up on important findings in parts that are not their own, or to forge new collaborations across distant parts of this rapidly expanding and evolving enterprise. Our goal is to complement those focused assessments with a synthesis that highlights the principle insights that have emerged from sustainability science and their practical implications for the pursuit of the goals of sustainable development. Other reviews, many of which we cite here, have assessed in detail the research on particular parts of the field. Research on sustainable development has grown explosively since the mid-1980s, with the field of sustainability science emerging as a global collaboration network in the early years of this century ( 1). We present here a strategic perspective on the central findings and current challenges of sustainability science. These are capacities to ( a) measure sustainable development, ( b) promote equity, ( c) adapt to shocks and surprises, ( d) transform the system into more sustainable development pathways, ( e) link knowledge with action, and ( f) devise governance arrangements that allow people to work together in exercising the other capacities. Research has identified six capacities necessary to support such interventions in guiding development pathways toward sustainability.
The long-term evolution of that system cannot be predicted but can be understood and partially guided through dynamic interventions. Compelling evidence has accumulated that those interactions should be viewed as a globally interconnected, complex adaptive system in which heterogeneity, nonlinearity, and innovation play formative roles. We construct an integrated framework highlighting the union set of elements and relationships that those approaches have shown to be useful in explaining nature–society interactions in multiple contexts. This review synthesizes diverse approaches that researchers have brought to bear on the challenge of sustainable development.
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