Sustainable development is the concept of needs and limitations imposed by technology and society on the environments ability to meet the present and future needs.
World Commission of Environment and Development (WCED) has defined sustainable development as a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction investments, the orientation or technological development and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations.
Thus, the concept of sustainable development provides framework for the integration of environmental policies and development strategies having implications at international, national regional and local levels. Development should not endanger the natural systems that support life on earth. Many people in the industrial world today operate with the frontier mentality, which is a human-centered view based on the three erroneous basic ideas:
- The world has an unlimited supply of resources for human use;
- Humans are apart from nature, and
- Nature is something to overcome.
With this attitude towards nature, technological advanced increase our ability to use earths resourced and thus, increase the damage.
However, the realization is growing fast that we are in a world of limits, and ever-increasing growth of material consumption can only damaged, the life-giving physical components of the environment.
Hence, the concept of sustainable development leads us to new resource consumption strategies, which are:
- Conservation or reduction of excessive resource use,
- Recycling and reuse of materials and
- More use of renewable resources like solar energy rather than non-renewable resources such as oil and coal.
Sustainable development also requires meeting the basic needs of all deprived people in this world and extending to all, the opportunities to satisfy their aspirations for a better life. Otherwise, the world, in which poverty and inequity are endemic, will always be prone to ecological and other crisis.
