EME 504
Foundations in Sustainability Systems

12.1 Our Global Common Future

The present decade has been marked by a retreat from social concerns. Scientists bring to our attention urgent but complex problems bearing on our very survival: a warming globe, threats to the Earth's ozone layer, deserts consuming agricultural land. We respond by demanding more details, and by assigning the problems to institutions ill-equipped to cope with them. Environmental degradation, first seen as mainly a problem of the rich nations and a side effect of industrial wealth, has become a survival issue for developing nations.

-Gro Harlem Brundtland
Oslo, 20 March 1987
Our Common Future

While firmly rooted in scientific consensus, the concerns voiced by Our Common Future remain a controversial area of social debate nearly twenty-eight years later. This protracted debate along with the long list of conflicting and partially implemented (or entirely neglected) international environmental treaties (over 900 according to the count in Biermann et al. 2012) is not a positive indicator of our current ability to create effective global environmental governance or of our ability to implement environmentally-driven policy. Top-down solutions are limited by political, social, and economic will to enforce environmentally-driven regulations that may be financially painful at least in the short run. Bottom-up solutions lack consistency, accountability, and legitimacy. Private-public partnerships have not fulfilled their initial promise (Biermann et al. 2012).

With such challenges, it is fair to fear that our common future will not be a sustainable one.

Let's start this module by thinking about what needs to happen to reduce risks and meet global economic development goals, while minimizing the negative consequences that human activity has on the environment and preserving the functionality of global life-support systems:

Improve our ability to determine whether or not we are creating more sustainable systems. As you may suspect, this issue has a lot to do with how difficult it is to measure sustainability and how far embedded non-sustainable practices are in the mechanics of production and delivery of services. We have discussed both of these issues, as well as potential solutions, as part of this course. In Module 2.5 and 2.6, we covered the differences in how to measure weak and strong sustainability and how in many ways it is easier to quantify if weak sustainability is augmenting. We also discussed the shortcomings of focusing on weak sustainability. We also covered how to keep track of materials and energy flows in systems of different sizes in Modules 3 to 5. We observed that our understanding of the impact of production processes on the environment depended directly on our ability to: (a) collect and organize all the data that was relevant to individual systems, (b) optimize energy and material flows at the system level, and (c) identify, address, and manage the occurrence of tipping points in systems.

Improve our understanding of where, when, and to what degree biophysical systems are likely to change and how to translate that knowledge into actionable items at the scales that are needed to allow organization and deployment of resources to communities that are affected by these changes. We cannot ethically demand for all countries to commit and to contribute to global environmental goals in the same manner. We will discuss these challenges as part of this module.