[MUSIC] Ideas about sustainable development first appeared in the UN World Conservation Strategy in 1980 explicitly aiming at, I quote: "help advance the achievement of sustainable development through the conservation of living resources", end of quote. Three years later, the UN General Assembly formed a commission to propose strategies for global sustainable development that was chaired by Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland. This so-called World Commission on Environment and Development had to face the same clashes of interest between industrialized and developing countries that had marked the Stockholm Conference. And this clearly showed in its final report that was published in 1987. The report was named "Our Common Future". And the title's emphasis on global community in the context of political bipolarity and enormous disparities between North and South was by no mean accidental. In 1977, the Brandt Commission was set up. And three years later in 1980, they launched or published their record on economic relations between North and South. In 1982, Olof Palme, the former and later Swedish Prime Minister, published the report "Common security". In 1985, Jamaican politician Michael Manley published a report on North-South relations. And then finally in 1987, Gro Harlem Brundtland published the report on environmental issues. And together these four reports cover all the important questions, North, South, East, West, economic challenges and of course the environmental questions. [MUSIC] Actually, we do need to go back to the 1970s, to the second half of the 1970s. In 1974, the Chancellor of West Germany Willy Brandt resigned after a scandal. And two years later, he was elected President of the Socialist International, which was a social democratic cooperation organization established in 1951. Shortly after he was elected president, he developed a concept of common solutions together with his associate Egon Bahr with whom he had worked together for many years in West Germany. This concept of common solutions, you could also say there's a notion of common solutions, it was a way to modernize and revitalize the social democratic's thinking of the 1970s. That was a period in which the liberal parties and the conservative parties gained power both in Western Europe, and in the United States. And consequently, the Social Democratic Parties lost power. So they had to reinvent their thinking and to modernize their thinking. And one of the ways of doing this was to come up with a new concept, and this was the common concept - 'gemeinsame sicherheit' - as they talked about in Germany. And the basic point in it is that you need to find common solutions with the adversary. So for instance, East-West relations could not be solved in isolation. The West had to find solutions with the East. Also the same when we talk about North-South challenges, they had to be found together. And when we talk about, for instance, environmental problems, they had to be found in cooperation with the adversaries because it was not a possibility to find these solutions isolated. So, when we talk about the common solutions, the notion of common solutions, we need to go back to the late 1970s. [MUSIC] Well, the deeper implications is that when we talk about challenges which are important, which are global challenges, according to the social democratic thinking, it is impossible to find solutions isolated. So the consequence is that, if the world wanted to take the environmental challenges seriously, they had to work together about finding solutions East-West, North-South, West-West, East-East, so on and so forth. So it is actually a way to globalize politics. What happened was that the Socialist International became quite popular in the late 1970s, and especially in the 1980s. So the number of member parties escalated dramatically in the 1980s. And a lot of the new parties came from the Global South and also from Asia, and from Latin America, and South America, and so and so forth. So they were quite happy with the concepts. But one thing is concepts, another thing is political implications. And I would say that, that kind of concepts may not change the world, but they may change the way people think, and that is what this is all about. [MUSIC] The Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as, I quote: "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." The strategy presupposed that on a global scale, environmental restoration and continued economic growth is both possible and necessary. It is, however, also important to notice the two-dimensional property of the ideal of sustainable development: those of temporal and spatial solidarity. Human needs everywhere should be met immediately without squandering future human prosperity anywhere. In 1994, British corporate advisor, John Elkington summarized the basic principles of sustainable development in the so-called Triple Bottom Line. Elkington said that you have to combine three aspects of sustainability: environmental sustainability, economical sustainability, and social sustainability in order to talk about real sustainability. Another distinction was made between what was called weak and strong sustainability, respectively. It was based on the foundational economic concept 'capital' and the relations between the stock and the revenue of that capital. Modern economists distinguish between four different kinds of capital: manufactured, human, social, and natural capital. In various combinations, they are all engaged in all production that generates goods or services. And according to Carlowitz' original definition, sustainability means maintaining this stock of capital. There are however, two different ways to do that. In weak sustainability, the capital stock is kept intact, but without regard to the composition of the four kinds. One form of capital might substitute another, urban infrastructure might work as well as natural landscapes. But in strong sustainability, the four forms of capital must be maintained in their original composition. No matter the finer varieties of sustainable development, however, limits are an inherent part of the concept. According to the Brundtland report of 1987, I quote: "Growth has no set limits in terms of population or resource use beyond which lies ecological disaster. Different limits hold for the use of energy, materials, water, and land. But ultimate limits there are, and sustainability requires that long before these are reached, the world must ensure equitable access to the constrained resource and reorient technological efforts to relieve the pressure", end of quote. So the classical ecological term 'carrying capacity' expressed our restriction by geophysical limits. Since 2000, this concept has increasingly been substituted by a wider term, planetary boundaries. [MUSIC] Planetary boundaries is an attempt to use scientific evidence to identify how much of the Earth's resources can humans use without running the risk that their overuse of those resources is going to change the conditions of the planet. We've all known since we got the pictures of the Earth from space from the Apollo mission in the late 60s and early 70s, just looking at those pictures, you can see the Earth's resources are limited. And as soon as you acknowledge that something is limited and it's something that we all need, you have to decide how you're going to share it among all the people on this planet. And in order to be able to make that plan, you need to know how much is there. Now when politicians go to Copenhagen, actually, they started there, saying two degrees was the limit for human-caused global warming. When they do that, it's a pretty easy job to go back to your desk and to calculate how big is the resource? In this case, the resource is a garbage dump for our greenhouse gasses that we share with everyone else on this planet. And it's pretty easy. Now we can say it's this big, we can say half the resource is used. We know exactly who used the first half, and the whole discussion is about who's going to get the rights to use the last half of that resource. But of course, it's not just the global garbage dump for our greenhouse gasses, that is the only resource that we're using on this planet. We're using biodiversity, water, we're felling forests, we're polluting, we're putting particles into the atmosphere, we're damaging the ozone layer, we're acidifying the ocean, and we're putting too much reactive phosphorus and nitrogen out into the environment. So, there are lots of processes in the Earth's ecosystem, you can call it, the Earth System as a whole. There are lots of processes that are critical for maintaining the Earth conditions we have today that we as humans are pressing really, really hard. So planetary boundaries attempts to identify a safe operating space, how much of those resources can we use without risking that the conditions on Earth are dramatically changed? [MUSIC] When we look at the different boundaries, we actually think that we're on the wrong side. We're on the outside of the safe operating space for several of them, climate, biodiversity, felling of forest, and release of reactive nitrogen and phosphorus to the environment, and were exceedingly close in terms of use of freshwater. Now, that in itself isn't a real problem in the sense that the planetary boundaries don't define a point that when you go over the edge, the world ends, they define a point where the risk of something very serious happening is increasing. So I like to think of planetary boundaries as being sort of like blood pressure. When your blood pressure is over 120/80, it's not a guarantee that you're going to have a heart attack, but it does increase the risk. So we do everything we can to bring it back. And it's worth noting that in the 1990s, we were on the wrong side of the safe operating space for the ozone hole, or at least the human impacts on the ozone layer which created the ozone hole. Now, thanks to the Montreal Protocol that came in, in 1987, we've pulled back, and we're back within the safe operating space. So we actually have a precedent for being able to manage our impacts on the Earth System as a whole, and to respect this safe operating space, the planetary boundaries. [MUSIC] As encapsulated by the Triple Bottom Line, environmental limits are not the only thing restricting us as we aim for sustainable development. There are also social lower bounds to the living standards of human beings such as food and water supplies, a steady income, education, gender equality, safety, etc. In 2012, British economist Kate Raworth combined this inner limit with the outer limits of planetary boundaries. And she ended up asking to the shape of this donut, can we live within the donut? And living within that donut is exactly what the 17 UN sustainable development goals targeted at 2030 impose us to finding ways of doing. The UN member states agreed upon them in 2015, and they serve as a common goal for global development. Building on the ideals of human rights and the principle of universality, the goals address environmental and socioeconomic development equally. With the SDG's, sustainable development has become a tangible but highly complex goal that calls for unprecedented efforts and concerted endeavors. In the next three modules, we will focus upon the historically formed ways that we think about social relations, nature, and societal change in order to find ways to achieve the ambitious SDG's. [MUSIC] The key takeaways from this module are that the UN sustainable development goals of 2015, builds on a long history of ideas and ideals about the cautious exploitation of natural resources, universal human rights, and history bringing progress rather than decline. In their present form, they were first devised by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987, and they represent an undisguised compromise between Northern environmentalism and Southern developmentalism. Due to the extreme high complexity of the SDG's and their inherent demand for continued economic growth, many consider them oxymoronic. [MUSIC]
