The Imperatives of Sustainable Development

By E. Holden, K. Linnerud, David Banister. 2017

382 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The United Nations sustainable development goals are under fire. By attempting to cover all that is good and desirable in society, these targets have ended up as vague, weak, or meaningless. We suggest a model for sustainable development based on three moral imperatives: satisfying human needs, ensuring social equity, and respecting environmental limits. The model reflects Our Common Future's central message, moral imperatives laid out in philosophical texts on needs and equity, and recent scientific insights on environmental limits. The model is in conflict with the popular three-pillar model of sustainable development, which seeks to balance social, environmental, and economic targets. Rather, we argue that sustainable development constitutes a set of constraints on human behaviour, including constraints on economic activity. By identifying indicators, and thresholds, we illustrate that different regions or groups of countries face different challenges. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/815cac30575820f0aa3972d966075dafae3c158e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Inês Lima Azevedo
2. P. Jaramillo
3. Nathan S. Lewis
4. K. Caldeira
5. Thomas H. Bradley
6. Jessika E. Trancik
7. Christopher B. Field
8. J. Edmonds

In Global and Planetary Change

1. K. Caldeira
2. K. Mach
3. Christopher B. Field
4. M. Mastrandrea
5. G. P. Peters
6. Robbie M. Andrew
7. Gregory F. Nemet
8. Justin Kitzes

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. Inês Lima Azevedo
2. K. Caldeira

Citations in the corpus

• Information and Communications Technologies for Sustainable Development Goals: State-of-the-Art, Needs and Perspectives (2018, background): “[18] proposed a model for SDGs, which could reflect the satisfaction of human needs, the enhancement of social equity and the respect towards environmental constraints.”
• Applying the SDGs to Cities: Business as Usual or a New Dawn? (2018, background): “This challenge has not been addressed in the SDG indicator framework, as it has not been addressed in any robust process for prioritising certain goals or defining baseline goals that need to be met before others [34,91].”
• Net-zero emissions energy systems (2018, background): “Particularly crucial are the rate and intensity of economic growth in developing countries and the degree to which such growth can avoid fossil-fuel energy while prioritizing human development, environmental protection, sustainability, and social equity (4, 107, 108).”