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Sustainable Development

Last changed: 08/10/2010

At the latest since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, sustainable development has been an established item on national and international agendas:

In 2002, Germany’s federal government adopted a sustainable development strategy for Germany. A year earlier, the "Rat für Nachhaltige Entwicklung" (Council for Sustainable Development) was convened as advisory body to the German government.
Like most of its Member States today, the European Union also has its own sustainable development strategy.
Internationally, the UN Commission for Sustainable Development (CSD) is providing major impetus to the further development of this concept.

The overarching goal of sustainable development is to strike a balance as fair as possible between the needs of the present generation and the prospects of future generations. Its central idea is long-term sustainable societal development which takes into account the environmental, economic and social dimensions. Put differently, sustainable development means preserving a world capable of sustaining a decent quality of life for us and for coming generations, and that there should be fairer relations between poor and rich regions.

The stakeholders and institutions concerned in part have different answers to the question of how this goal should be achieved. The position of the Federal Environment Agency is: The limits of a use of the environment beneficial to us and our fellow creatures cannot be extended at will. We cannot exploit the Earth endlessly – to gain raw materials, for example - or pollute it indefinitely without any negative consequences. There are natural limits. Therefore, the Federal Environment Agency employs the image of a shipping channel in a river, delimited by buoys. The buoys define the boundaries which the ship of economic and social development must not cross, if future generations’ natural sources of life are not to be harmed. The ship may move freely within the buoys, but it must not leave the channel.

Various issues belong on the sustainability agenda. In Germany, these are, for example:

a sustainable settlement policy, i.e. strategies adapted to developments such as demographic change and migration;
sustainable education and research as the motor for innovation;
a sustainable family policy, e.g. through the Alliance for Families or Local Alliances for Families programmes;
an ageing policy with positive labour market effects, e.g. through employment pacts and the ”Strategy for lifelong learning in Germany” of July 2004;
a sustainable climate policy and modern electricity supply through integration of renewable energy sources and increase in energy efficiency;
use of renewable raw materials for new products and growing markets;
sustainable forestry.

Problems to be focused on globally include, for example:

the climate changes which are already making themselves felt, and their potential effects;
the decline in animal and plant species;
progressing erosion and the rapid loss of fertile soils;
the shortage of usable fresh water that already exists or is emerging in some regions.

Issues