Sustainable Development
A critical evaluation of where sustainable development has come to 12 years after the Rio Conference
Has a consensus evolved around a useful concept that can be put to practical use or do we have instead a verbal consensus where in fact there are real differences and in many cases insufficient hard information to operationalise often nebulous ideas? Simon Upton argues against an ideological approach to sustainable development that covers almost any field of human endeavour as well as being extended temporally across generations because it spawns a complexity that exhausts its audience and dilutes any conclusions to the point of being meaningless. But that is not to deny the usefulness of the idea of sustainable development as a way of integrating many divergent issues: "There are real issues of environmental degradation and poverty that haunt people even if they hold radically differently ideological views about how the future should unfold. Real issues affecting real people in the real world do not evaporate because of faulty theories." Instead, he advocates "a more modest, pared down version that is compatible with the sort of human and institutional limitations that politicians and citizens with limited resources and, frankly, limited attention spans can realistically be asked to embrace." In advocating a return to the original Rio compromise the paper proposes that particular attention should be paid to "ignorance, time, a reluctance to make difficult trade-offs and a system of international treaties that is not equal to some of the challenges globalisation poses.
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A Few Facts about Renewable Energy
Paper delivered at the New Zealand Resource Management Law
Association Conference in October 2004.
Concerns about rising CO2 levels as a result of fossil fuel use and security of supply have caused renewed interest in renewable sources of energy. Access to renewable energy sources varies depending on regional conditions including latitude, topography and the hydrological cycle. As a result the overall potential of renewable energy, is often left undetermined. This paper, drawing on recent work by Smil (2004), seeks to describe the potential – and inherent limits – of renewable sources of energy at the global level and then, drawing on estimates by Sims, describe the potentials available in New Zealand. It then proceeds to discuss barriers to significant market penetration by renewable energy sources in respect of electricity generation and transport. Reference is made to recent work commissioned by the OECD Round Table on Sustainable Development and the results of the recent Mobility Project undertaken by members of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development.
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Sustainable Development Nine Years after Rio
For about fifteen years now we have been living with the idea of sustainability.
It has found its way into almost every corner of public policy. It has
spawned a vast literature. And it has become a catch-all which a bewildering
array of businesses, public interest groups, and political organisations
have felt obliged to graft it onto their agendas. However, its success
as a unifying principle of policy and conduct is also its Achilles heel.
For, as the notion of sustainability has expanded to embrace almost
everything, the possibility of it supporting a clear and focussed agenda
has been placed at risk. Full text
Measuring what?
Ever since the Rio Conference, the search has been on for indicators
of sustainable development. While the Rio Principles never define sustainable
development in so many words, Principle 3 talks of the right to development
"so as to equitably meet developmental and environmental needs of present
and future generations." For such a high-level goal to be more than
just words, signatories appreciated that they had to be able say something
about whether they were moving towards that goal. Thus, in Agenda 21,
they noted that "methods for assessing interactions between different
sectoral environmental, demographic, social and developmental parameters
are not sufficiently developed or applied." Nevertheless, they urged
countries to "develop the concept of indicators of sustainable development"
in a way that would "contribute to a self-regulating sustainability
of integrated environment and development systems." Full
text
Has Sustainable Development strayed too wide?
Paper delivered to the annual meeting of the Alliance for Global
Sustainability, San Hosé, Costa Rica, March 2002
Without even opening the cover of Agenda 21 (surely one of the most
prolix documents ever generated by an
inter-governmental process), a reading of the 27
principles of the Rio Declaration discloses a breathtakingly ambitious
policy terrain. But it is still tractable. But
there are growing doubts about the emergence of an
agenda, which has been grafted onto it since Rio. This
agenda risks skewing the focus and weakening the utility of the concept
of sustainability. Specifically, it is about the
so-called 'three pillars' definition of sustainable development that has
gained currency in recent years. It appears
that the division between the socio-economic and the biophysical
sphere did not go far enough for some. Full
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