Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Australian Will Steffen, director of the international Geosphere-Biosphere
Program
(Wallstrom 2004). It came shortly after the equally alarming pre-
diction in the journal
that a quarter of species will be
extinct by mid-century under a mid-range global warming scenario. Even at
the lowest range of climate change, 18 per cent would be extinct. The
authors stressed that these '… estimates show the importance of rapid
implementation of technologies to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and
strategies for carbon sequestration'.
In 2002 an earlier wake-up call had come from a team of scientists led by
Mathis Wackernagel in a paper published by the US National Academy of
Sciences (Wackernagel 2002). Humanity's collective demands surpassed the
earth's regenerative capacity around 1980. Every year since, we further
exceed that capacity by another 1 per cent, Wackernagel said.
The evidence suggests that progress in the human economy has been at
the expense of the earth's natural assets. We are accelerating towards collapse
of the natural capital on which human society and its economy depends. We
are not living sustainably.
There were even earlier warnings. The issue of sustainability first
emerged with the publication of
Nature
(Thomas 2004
)
in 1972 (Meadows
1972), the same year as the first Earth Summit. The topic concluded that the
finite nature of the natural environment meant that, in terms of material
throughput, the world economic system could not expand indefinitely. It
said, however, that if actions were taken to modify current trends, the world
economic system could move into a configuration that would be 'sustainable
far into the future'. Because of the environmental limits on continuing eco-
nomic growth, meeting the needs of the poor would have to come through
major redistribution of wealth and income from rich to poor both between
and within nations.
Subsequently in 1987, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of
Norway, as head of the World Commission on Environment and Develop-
ment, introduced a concept of 'sustainable development' in the topic
The Limits to Growth
Our
Common Future
Widely known as 'The Brundtland
Report', it defined sustainable development as that which:
(Brundtland 1987)
.
... seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without
compromising the ability to meet those in the future.
