Sustainable development using technology cooperation is accurately described by which statements

2.67.4 Challenges of Sustainability

Sustainable development is clearly one of the most difficult challenges that humanity has ever faced. Attaining sustainability requires addressing many fundamental issues at local, regional, and global levels, and achieving the goals and objectives of sustainability presents a great challenge for all segments of society. A core principle of sustainable development is to improve human well-being and to sustain these improvements over time, but the consequences of climate change and the growing demand for energy and resources are making this objective more challenging.

Environmental degradation and extreme alterations and changes to the natural environment can be found everywhere and are part of the challenges of sustainable development. All these can be observed in many parts of the world, and reduce the ability to manipulate and alter the fundamental relationships that sustain the planet's ecosystems.5

With Brundtland‘s definition of sustainability in mind, human access to natural resources becomes an essential right for the well-being of society and a critical element of a dignified life, along with the transformation to a knowledge-based service economy. This right includes the following: biophysical environment, economic dimension, social dimension, and institutional dimension (Figure 2).

Sustainable Development

Sustainable development is defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The concept of needs goes beyond simply material needs and includes values, relationships, freedom to think, act, and participate, all amounting to sustainable living, morally, and spiritually.

The 30-year journey of four World Summits from Stockholm to Nairobi to Rio and to Johannesburg has put the world on notice that achieving sustainable development in the twenty-first century is not an option but an imperative.

The 1972 UN conference in Stockholm highlighted the concerns for preserving and enhancing the environment and its biodiversity to ensure human rights to a healthy and productive world. The developing countries argued that their priority was development, whereas the developed countries made a case for environmental protection and conservation as the prime issue.

The 1982 Nairobi Summit reviewed the progress in the decade since the Stockholm Conference and called upon national governments to intensify efforts to protect the environment and stressed the need for international cooperation. However, the tensions between Western Governments and the Soviet Union marred progress and commitment toward a Nairobi action plan.

In 1983 the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development was created and in 1987, the Commission issued the Brundtland Report. This report highlighted that equity, growth, and environmental maintenance are simultaneously possible and that each country is capable of achieving its full economic potential while at the same time enhancing its resource base. It emphasized three fundamental components to sustainable development: environmental protection, economic growth, and social equity.

During the period 1972–92, over 200 regional and international agreements and conventions for environmental protection and conservation were adopted. However, most of these agreements were negotiated individually and treated as ‘separate entities’, with many lacking systemic integration within the social, economic, and environmental framework of sustainable development.

In 1992, the Earth Summit brought the world’s governments to deliberate and negotiate an agenda for environment and development in the twenty-first century. At a parallel Global Forum, nongovernmental organizations from around the world also discussed and deliberated strategies for sustainable development. While there was little formal interaction between these two meetings, the world’s civil societies succeeded in having their voices noticed. It was an important step toward future dialog and active participation of civil society in sustainable development regimes from local to global levels.

The Earth Summit unanimously adopted the Agenda 21, a comprehensive blue print of actions toward sustainable development, including detailed work plans, goals, responsibilities, and also estimates for funding. Other important accomplishments included the Rio Declaration, a statement of broad principles to guide national conduct on environmental protection and development, and adoption of treaties on climate change and biodiversity, and forest management principles.

The first principle of the Rio Declaration states “human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development.” The declaration also highlighted the ‘polluter-pays-principle’ and the ‘precautionary principle’, as important considerations for the protection and conservation of nature.

Whether addressing vulnerability to environmental change, responsibility for environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity, or policy priorities, careful consideration of the particular groups of people involved, and their social, economic, and environmental conditions, is essential. Focusing on people – their rights, capabilities, and opportunities – has multiple benefits for individuals, society, and their relationship with the environment.

Agenda 21 pointed out that different populations had ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ for impacts on the environment. In Rio, the thinking was dominated by the goal of converging trends in different parts of the world. There was the clear hope that the developing countries would catch up, while the rich countries would become increasingly environmentally conscious and curb their excessive consumption and the related pollution and waste. This has not come to pass.

Consumption per se is not something to be avoided since it is one important aspect of improving human well-being. Equally important is the recognition that the relationships between well-being, levels of consumption, and environmental impacts depend on the value systems, the effectiveness of institutions, including forms of governance, as well as science, technology, and knowledge.

The lack of progress in turning Agenda 21 into actions for sustainable development leads to the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on sustainable development. Johannesburg put the thrust on public–private partnerships for sustainable development through an endorsement of some 500 such partnerships but most of these agreements failed to be implemented.

Prior to the Johannesburg Summit, in September 2000, political leaders from around the world took an unprecedented step of setting concrete 2015 targets for millennium development goals (MDGs) related to the priority challenges of sustainable development, namely, poverty, hunger, education, gender, health, environmental sustainability, and a global partnership for development. All these issues are interrelated; one cannot be solved without tackling the others. The progress up to 2007 indicates that many of these MDGs are unlikely to be realized by 2015.

The nations of the world at the Earth Summit failed to mobilize the financial resources for the implementation of Agenda 21, and the WSSD in Johannesburg failed to turn agenda into actions. The critical issues of education and human capital were also not on the WSSD agenda. The scientific and technological capacity is essential and educational and research institutions around the world have a fundamental responsibility to contribute to this.

Education comprises a lifelong learning system to cope with the changing needs and aspirations of society. The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, starting in 2005, lays the foundation to reform and mobilize education at all levels, from schools to universities, in support of sustainable development.

Uneven Development

Sustainability research in human geography and in the broader social sciences more generally, has raised important questions concerning spatial inequality and uneven development. Some of the more radical writers see this inequality as both a cause and a consequence of growing environmental vulnerability and unsustainability. This works at different spatial scales. Clearly, late capitalism and its more recent neoliberal and globalizing tendencies have exposed many countries and regions to new forms of environmental exploitation as part of the race toward more capitalist and globalized ‘development’. Northern advanced countries and their corporate firms may advocate more ecological modernization at home (e.g., the raft of European Union (EU) legislation on pollution, waste recycling, and agricultural land protection), while basing this upon the importation of ‘cheaper’ goods, services, and commodities produced in more unsustainable conditions.

Thus environmental vulnerability and unsustainability can be conveniently exported in the name of neoliberal trade regulation and privatized supply-chain management. This is most clearly seen in the contemporary sense, for instance, in patterns of trade (for such ‘environmental goods’ as ‘fresh’ foods, timber products, biofuels) from (as well as between) the newly industrializing countries of Southeast Asia, including most notably China and Latin America. This multicentric reproduction of dominant and dependent states and spaces as part of the global capitalist logic and the relatively cheap carbon-based transport and patterns of trade on which it relies, is seen by many scholars as a root systemic cause of uneven unsustainability. The creation, recreation, and redistribution of rights and regulations associated with dominant, dependent, and what we might term ‘void spaces’ (areas of the world (e.g., parts of sub-Saharan Africa) which have an absence of any resources needed by the dominant powers), is a major feature and condition of contemporary sustainability. The current increasing politics and economics of the scarcity of oil reserves on the one hand, and the realization of global climate change on the other, serve to intensify these uneven development tendencies and their geopolitical controversies and manifestations. These have been clearly expressed both inside and outside of the current round of world trade (World Trade Organization (WTO)) talks and world environmental summits. Such global arenas become sites of major contestation, not only between void, dependent, and advanced nations and regions, but also between politicians, corporate firms, and a variety of globally linked NGOs.

Of course, these patterns of uneven resource exploitation as part and parcel of the (declining) carbon-based economy are also played out at the lower spatial scales, within states, and between cities and regions. There has been a recent and growing literature in many of the new environmental and planning journals about the processes and expressions of territorial environmental deprivation and justice. This was clearly expressed most vividly by the Hurricane Katrina disaster which combined both the realization and denial of climate change with the uneven processes of human poverty, vulnerability, and its effects.

Even at the city level we see more affluent parts enacting a more ecologically modernizing path (through, for instance, locally based recycling and organic food box schemes), while on the other side of the tracks there remain ‘food deserts’, high-risk air pollution, and lower levels of life expectancy. Hence, the onset of sustainability debates has served to rightly reinvigorate and infuse debates about spatial inequalities at the multiple scales of city, region, and nation-state. At the same time these spatial inequalities are now partly expressed through deepening disparities in living conditions and consumption patterns.

Discussion

A review of sustainability assessment methodologies reveals that only a few of the approaches consider the economy, society, and environment. Methodologies based on weak sustainability tend to concentrate on economic considerations while neglecting the biophysical aspects of sustainability. However, biophysical approaches are mostly concerned with environmental sustainability while neglecting socioeconomic dimensions.

Policy makers usually prefer an aggregate sustainability index that can be easily interpreted and communicated to the general public. Construction of composite indicators requires data normalization, weighting, and aggregation, which are not always done correctly. Although a single-value measure of sustainability that a composite index provides is attractive from a communication perspective, there is a loss of useful information during aggregation. Sustainability is a multidimensional concept, and a single-value measurement can be misleading as it masks details such as the strengths and weaknesses of the subject under investigation.

The challenge of achieving a more sustainable society is a systems problem, where the economy, society, and environment are all interdependent. The primary shortcoming of existing techniques of measuring sustainability is the lack of a systems perspective. Assessment methodologies need to view the system under study as a whole and understand the interaction effects of the various subsystems.

Introduction

The term sustainable development is a well-used one and is probably familiar to many within and beyond academia, certainly in the more developed parts of the world. It is a term that we come across in arenas ranging from door-step recycling initiatives to media explanations of global security issues. Within human geography, it informs research extending from social exclusion within cities of the United Kingdom to outcomes of environmental transformations in rural Africa. Indeed, some consider that there is none so relevant a discipline as geography to contribute to the sustainable development debates given its ability to marry the science of the environment with an understanding of economic, political, and cultural change, that is, development. The pursuit of sustainable development is now stated as a principal policy goal of organizations and institutions across all scales of public life and the field of academic and practical enquiry around sustainable development is a diverse and expanding one.

It is generally acknowledged that the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (also known as the Brundtland Commission) published in 1987 did much to bring the term ‘sustainable development’ into the popular consciousness and onto public agendas. This commission, established by the United Nations (UN), comprised people drawn from member states of both the more developed and less developed worlds and was charged with identifying the long-term environmental strategies for the international community. Its definition of sustainable development, as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” has become the most widely cited expression of the term. The fundamental notion that development today should not be at the expense of that in the future has found widespread allegiance.

As the term sustainable development reaches both further into daily lives and becomes bound up with ever-larger movements of the modern world, academics and practitioners are increasingly aware of the need to reflect critically on the fundamental principles encapsulated within the term as it evolves. In addition, close examination is needed of what is trying to be achieved and how, in the name of sustainable development, to encompass the multiple and often competing agendas being pursued and to interpret changes within dynamic local and global contexts. To that end, this review accords substantial detail to the origins and development of the notion of sustainable development and how the complex interdependencies of economic, social, and environmental development processes and their outcomes are being revealed in the pursuit of sustainable development.

The concept of sustainable development has gained some degree of notoriety including for its ‘slippery nature’ (the multiple definitions that it has), its ambiguities (the various interpretations that flow from those definitions), and its fundamentally oxymoronic character (the suggested opposition between the two encapsulated terms). This review details a number of frameworks that have been forwarded for handling the diversity and dynamism associated with the notion and points to the principal ongoing divisions within the field of enquiry. For some, the way in which the notion of sustainable development has been redefined so many times and in relation to so many aspects of society–environment relationships undermines its usefulness. For others, it is the contestations over the direction of social and economic development into the future (the discord of modern politics) that are the substance of sustainable development and as such, the utility of the idea lies precisely in the debate and compromise that it challenges researchers and practitioners to engage in.

Two particular literatures, those of environmentalism and of development, are considered to be particularly important in understanding the origins of sustainable development. The first use of the term ‘sustainable development’ is acknowledged to have been within the World Conservation Strategy of 1980 that was drawn up by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. For the first time, development was forwarded as a means for achieving conservation bringing the two literatures closer together. However, the 1980s are also understood to have been an era of ‘impasse’ within both the theory and practice of development. Past theories were upturned and seemed to offer little in terms of explaining the current experiences of development and underdevelopment (let alone into the future). It was also a period when the failures of ‘development’ on the ground were increasingly evident including the environmental impacts of the mounting debt crisis and of the solutions implemented to solve it.

In the globalized era of the early years of the twenty-first century, environmentalism is considered to be thriving, particularly as it has adapted to changing scientific evidence and has been informed by the ideas of related social movements such as ecofeminism. Whilst it can be considered that discourses remain dominated by environmental sustainability concerns, the work of geographers is proving important in placing human needs and rights more centrally into these agendas. In turn, development studies (and development geography) is considered to have moved beyond its impasse to be characterized by lively debate within which environmental, social, and economic sustainability are a central concern. Whilst this review provides evidence of the substantial work of geographers, particularly in uncovering the nexus of poverty–environment relationships, there is continued concern as to how far this work is impacting on the literature and practices of sustainable development.

One way in which sustainable development can now be considered a concept that has come of age is through its position as a primary policy goal of many of the major institutions of the world, including the UN and the World Bank (WB). In particular, finding new approaches to poverty alleviation is currently considered to be on a new and superior roll. This review analyses how this consensus has development and considers how the policy prescriptions that flow from it intersect with local and global environmental agendas.

Discussions of the idea and practices of sustainable development are centrally concerned with the future of the Earth and its inhabitants’ relationships, and policy challenges that are the long-standing traditional concerns of geographers. This review considers the contribution of human geography in exposing the inherently political and conflictual endeavor that is sustainable development, in particular through the work within political ecology.

2.1 Sustainability, Prices, and Taxes

There is no single satisfactory definition of sustainability, not even the classical definition of the Bruntland Commission.6 This is partly due to the fact that in the very long term, everything is going to change, adapt, and evolve. What, for example, will be the needs of a future generation in the year 2100? Will these needs require more physical assets and personal possessions or a greater sense of spiritual awareness and living in harmony with the natural environment? In view of the difficulties in defining the concept of sustainability precisely, we propose a practical definition in economic terms.

In a world where there are both traditional resources, such as fossil fuels, and new resources—such as a mix of renewable resources, more efficient energy saving technologies, and so on—we know for sure that in the long run, sustainability means that the share of new resources should approach 100%, as existing resources are finite and therefore doomed to become exhausted.

In the medium run we can predict the share of renewables as a function of prices because the proportion between traditional and new resources depends on their relative prices and consumer preferences. The reasoning is as follow: As the price of finite resources rises over time, the price of renewables drops in relative terms. This, in turn, makes new resources more attractive, encourages new investments, and leads to new behaviors including the adoption of greater efficiency. Over time, as the adoption of new technologies spreads, the share of new resources increases. If new energy technologies grow faster than total demand, the share of new resources in total consumption accelerates. With economies of scale, the relative price of renewable energy resources falls, leading to faster penetration.

In this context, we define sustainability as increased investment in new resources recognizing that this may lead to a number of sustainable trajectories. Obviously, the higher the level of investment in energy efficiency and renewable resources, the more sustainable the future is likely to be.7

To make investment in renewables more attractive, their price must approach those of alternative fossil fuels—the so-called price parity concept. To achieve price parity, there are two alternatives:

Either we wait until fossil fuel prices rise gradually due to growing scarcities. This option entails significant environmental degradation while we wait; or

We fully internalize the externality costs associated with the use of finite fossil fuels by filling the gap between the private and social costs through taxes. Alternatively, we can capture the shadow benefits of renewable resources through subsidies and/or mandatory standards.

Raising fossil fuel prices by including externalities, however, are politically unpopular. History helps to assess to what extent a price increase can be sustained by an economic system before political reaction takes over. Quoting an anecdote from the Italian Renaissance, we know that when the Pope imposed a tax on salt in about 1530, the inhabitants of Florence and Perugia reacted by introducing the famous Tuscan bread, which is unsalted. In Florence, which had partial access to the sea, the sacrifice was bearable. But in land-locked Perugia, the population rioted in the streets, which resulted in the Pope's army taking control.8

The lesson may be that a modest price increase may be acceptable if the cause is justified. But how much of an externality price, say a carbon tax, may be bearable to promote new investment in renewable energy technologies and/or support additional investment in energy efficiency? In principle: “The most appropriate response would be to set up a global infrastructure investment program that gives the appropriate market signals to the private sector and levels the playing field for alternative energy technologies” (Banuri, 2007). In practice, we know that there is the menace of all sorts of distorting administrative procedures, opaque bureaucracies, and stranded costs that continue to hang over the new sustainable development process. And these issues would be amplified on a global scale with highly uneven application of the basic principles.

The key question in this context is whether the world at large is in fact ready to adjust the current prices of fossil-based energy resources to include their full externality costs. Such an adjustment is ultimately needed to spur investment in renewable technologies, as well as more efficient energy using capital stock and in eventually changing our lifestyles and personal habits toward a more sustainable future.

Economic theory can determine the appropriate price for this to happen, and markets are flexible and resourceful if given the necessary time to make the needed adjustments. But if the politicians consider the price adjustments to be too high to be politically acceptable, they will be reluctant to impose them.

2.2.1 Goals of Sustainability

In 2012, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development met to discuss and develop a set of goals to work toward; they grew out of the Millennium Development Goals that claimed success in reducing global poverty while acknowledging there was still much more to do. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) eventually came up with a list of 17 items (8) that included amongst other things:

the end of poverty and hunger

better standards of education and healthcare, particularly as it pertains to water quality and better sanitation

to achieve gender equality

sustainable economic growth while promoting jobs and stronger economies

sustainability to include health of the land, air, and sea

Finally, it acknowledged the concept of nature having certain rights, that people have stewardship of the world, and the importance of putting people at the forefront of solving these global issues.

Thus, sustainable development recognizes that growth must be both inclusive and environmentally sound to reduce poverty and build shared prosperity for today’s population and to continue to meet the needs of future generations. It is efficient with resources and carefully planned to deliver both immediate and long-term benefits for people, the planet, and prosperity. The three pillars of sustainable development–economic growth, environmental stewardship, and social inclusion (Fig. 2.1)—carry across all sectors of development, from cities facing rapid urbanization to agriculture, infrastructure, energy development and use, water availability, and transportation.

Many of these objectives may seem to conflict with each other in the short term. For example, industrial growth might conflict with preserving natural resources. Yet, in the long term, responsible use of natural resources now will help ensure that there are resources available for sustained industrial growth far into the future.

Economic development is about providing incentives for businesses and other organizations to adhere to sustainability guidelines beyond their normal legislative requirements. The supply and demand market is consumerist in nature, and modern life requires a lot of resources every single day; economic development is about giving people what they want without compromising quality of life, especially in the developing world.

Social development is about awareness of and legislation protection of the health of people from pollution and other harmful activities of business. It deals with encouraging people to participate in environmental sustainability and teaching them about the effects of environmental protection as well as warning of the dangers if we cannot achieve our goals.

Environmental protection is the need to protect the environment, whether the concept of 4 Rs (reduce, recycle, recover, and reuse) are being achieved or not. Businesses that are able to keep their carbon emissions low is toward environmental development. Environmental protection is the third pillar and, to many, the primary concern of the future of humanity.

It defines how to protect ecosystems, air quality, integrity, and sustainability of our resources and focuses on the elements that place stress on the environment. It also concerns how technology will drive our greener future; and that developing technology is key to this sustainability and protecting the environment of the future from potential damage that technological advances could potentially bring.

The process of describing indicators helps diverse members of a community reach consensus on what sustainability means. Indicators help put sustainability in concrete terms that demonstrate a new way to measure progress. Concepts like a person’s ecological footprint help people understand how their everyday actions relate to issues that seem beyond the reach of a single individual and explain sustainability.

Abstract

We started this book with the goal to describe science reform efforts to help solve the sustainability crisis. Remember—some change will be required, as, by definition, an unsustainable system cannot continue along its current ways. Whether the change is planned and orderly or forced and chaotic depends on the level of anticipation and effort to be proactive. Our working assumption and intuitive insight from a combined 50 years of research and applications in systems and network ecology was that the existing science paradigm and analytical methods based on it have not worked. Thus, from that starting point, in order to address the crisis, we did the opposite of analysis—we enlarged the problem context rather than picking out a reduced subset of the system-of-systems complexity to tackle in isolation. We hope this final chapter serves to inspire optimism that the reformed scientific foundations we have presented hold true potential to catalyze lasting and systemic change for human–environment sustainability.

7.1 Social sustainability

Social sustainability is the least determined and least apprehended of the various methods of achieving sustainability and sustainable development. Social sustainability has had significantly less interest in public discourse than economic and environmental sustainability.

There are numerous procedures for sustainability. The primary, which postulates a trio of environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, and social sustainability, is the most broadly accepted as a model for addressing sustainability. The idea of “social sustainability” in this method includes subjects such as social equity, livability, health equity, community development, social capital, social support, human rights, labor rights, place-making, social responsibility, social justice, cultural competence, community resilience, and human adaptation.

A second, newer one is the method suggesting that all fields of sustainability are social, consisting of ecological, economic, political, and cultural sustainability. Those fields of social sustainability are based on the connection between the social and the natural, with the ecological field defined as human embeddedness in the environment. In these items, social sustainability includes all human activities (Atkinson et al., 2003). It is not just relevant to the focused intersection of economics, the environment, and the social.

4.5 Conclusion

Sustainable development is one of the prerequisites for reducing negative climate change. One of the dominant sectors that could potentially contribute to achieving this sustainable goal is the energy sector. However, to make the energy system a sustainable one, it is necessary to assess its sustainability status (Khan, 2021). In this chapter, the sustainability concept for energy systems was discussed briefly. The many different indicators related to energy system sustainability were then presented with the help of the recent literature. Different MCDA methods frequently applied for the sustainability assessment of energy systems in the literature were presented. Finally, an MCDA method (COPRAS) was applied as an example to assess the sustainability status of different electricity generation technologies, and to show its application in the electricity generation sector.