Hi, I'm going to talk to you about sustainable development. We have some sectors in the daily life that affects the environment. For example, the environmental engineering sectors that supplies us with water supply, sanitation, waste water, and all of that. We have agriculture, we have transport, we have food production, food consumption. All these sectors are sectors that are really affecting the environment. And these are sectors that are controlled by the governments. Different countries have their own sectors, ministries, departments that are taking care of this. So they can sort of control and make sure, it goes in the right direction. Some issues are of course political and not always moving in a good direction. And then these sectors have to deal with some changes that are happening gradually. We have, for example, demographic development, we're getting more and more people and those people are moving, we have the urbanization. And then we also have climate changes that is making some big challenges to some of these sectors. So these are some of the things that are gradually challenging the management of the different sectors. Then we have some sudden onsets things like disasters,we have some disasters that are natural events which become disasters because people have chosen to live in those places, we have some disasters that are directly man made, we have wars and similar things and different sizes. So these things are posing some challenges to the management of the different sectors. Apart from the sectors itself, we have the economy. Whenever we have to manage and decide whether to do this project or another project, we have to look into the economy. Economy is both a limiting factor which can decide how we can do things, how much we can do. But it's also a driver for development and the fact that can be used to implement a certain development. All these things are very complicated together and making it difficult to make sure that we have a good global environment that we are dealing with in this course. So how can we analyze these things? How can we put all the things together, making sure that we have proper development? We are using a term like sustainable development. It was something that was very popular when I was a young man in the late 1980s. Sustainable development at that time were discussed in different forms and definition was made by what was called at that time the Bruntland commission. That sustainable development is a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. And that is a good definition. It was also criticized for being very much on the environmental side because of the last part of that sentence, the ability for the future generations. This is hinting at the environment, making sure we're not destroying the environment. But it's not very precise on what is meeting the needs. If we want to operationalize sustainable development, we have to look at three types of sustainability. We have the environmental sustainability, we have just one planet which has a limited amount of resources, resources that have to be managed. So we can recycle them and use it over and over again. On the planet lives the human beings in a society and we talk about the social sustainability. This is when we implement social solutions that are possible to work that satisfies our needs as a society. We have certain cultures, we have certain wishes to live together in a certain way so that is the social sustainability. Within the society, we have also the economy. We have economic development and the economical sustainability is important to take into account because we need to afford the development that we're making. And use these economy as a driver to implement certain things. So these three levels of sustainability they can be further transferred into tools, analytical tools. This is an example of a tool used for analyzing sustainability of cities in a city we have. You could say that people are more important than environment. Everything is built, everything is constructed for human beings. So in this case they have chosen to take the social sustainability and split it into the political sustainability and the cultural sustainability. And then under those say now four headings, you can define certain targets, certain measures that are used to see if that particular activity is sustainable in the city. Another example is development projects, like the projects that are done in developing countries. And in this case, it's a project that goes on for a certain number of years. And then after that you have implemented solutions that have to work later on. In that case sustainability is more about making sure that the things you have implemented are also working years ahead. So here the sustainability headings is more on the institutional sustainability we talk about this institution that has to manage these things you implement, and you can talk about it. Technological sustainability the things that we implement also has to be durable in years ahead. So, sustainable development is a soft approach. It's a flexible approach that can be used to develop other tools that are particularly useful. If we want to measure the development of a society, we can use the Human Development Index. This is an average of the health of its people, the educational level and the income of say the standard of living in the society. It's a very simple index which has also been criticized for not taking into account the differences among the population. So therefore there's a revised version called the inequality adjusted human development index that takes this into account. The Human Development Index has mostly been used for ranking countries among each other. But right now, where we're standing in 2015, we're seeing the introduction of a new measure of development, and that is the decision on the sustainable development goals. Sustainable development goals are being approved in the United Nations in a week from now when I'm recording this, and in a meeting where heads of state are meeting in New York and deciding on this framework for development for the next 15 years. Since the year 2000 we have been working with the millennium development goals that was the more simple eight goals with 17 targets and mostly focused on health and development in developing countries. The sustainable development goals are much more comprehensive. They include 17 goals and each of these goals have about ten different targets. And they are in many, many areas, they are very broad. They are focusing on ending poverty. Poverty is a major cause for many of the other goals that is addressed in this. It's also including hunger, it's including health and hygiene, it's including education and employment. Is looking at equality between genders, equality between countries and inside countries. It's including the climate changing, it's including the conservation of ocean and land resources, and it's looking at improving cities, improving water supply sanitation and much, much more. So the list is long and reflecting that the world is very complex, that there are many things that make up a good life for us. And, at this time, in September 2015, there has not been said precise indicators nor has there been a reporting framework, but if it's going to be like the millennium development goals we're going to see reports coming out every year from every country. So, every country has to show openly what is the status of all these different factors. And it's very big and complex, and how it's going to be used is still to be seen. But for sure it's going to guide a lot of the development efforts for the next years. And for sure it is forcing countries to look openly about many factors not only focusing on a few factors, and forgetting the things that are not so good. So if hopefully it's going to be an important tool, and because of the focus both on the environmental factors and different factors related to livelihood. It's something that is very important also for the global environmental management because it's not only about the environment, it's about the environment and the well-being of the people. And therefore it's going to be very relevant also for the things we're looking at in this course.
