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Sustainable Development and Transport Sustainable development has been hindered by a widely held notion that development can be defined primarily as economic growth; this has been the framework used for many years by developed countries to achieve their current levels of wealth, and major developing economies appear set to follow a similar course. The problem with such an approach is that: (a) economic growth does not necessarily guarantee social equity and (b) natural resources are exhaustible, both in terms of quality (e.g. environmental pollution) and supply (e.g. oil/ gas reserves) (Drexhage and Murphy, 2010).
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Sustainable Development The World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) report ‘Our Common Future’ (1987) provides the ‘classic’ definition of sustainable development1 as ‘…the development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED, 1987). Acceptance of the report by the United Nations General Assembly gave the term political salience and, in 1992, leaders set out the principles of sustainable development at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), also referred to as the Rio Summit or the Earth Summit. Sustainable development is a fluid concept (see e.g. DESA, 2013). In spite of ongoing discussions on its exact meaning, certain fundamental principles have emerged in the past decades (Drexhage and Murphy, 2010): (i) a commitment that decisions should consider equity and fairness and account for the rights of future generations; (ii) a long-term view should emphasize the precautionary principle, i.e. “where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation”2 and (iii) sustainable development involves understanding and acting on the complex interconnections between its three pillars, i.e. the economy, society and the environment. Acting on the complex interconnections between the economy, society and the environment should not be a balancing act; instead, there is an apparent need for convergence between the three pillars of sustainable development, i.e. the economic development, social equity and environmental health/sustainability; moreover, sustainable The framework for sustainable development evolved between the early seventies and the early nineties in many international conferences and initiatives. The 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm) led to the establishment of the United Nation Environment Programme and numerous national environmental protection agencies. Stockholm’s recommendations were further considered in the 1980 World Conservation Strategy (e.g. Talbot, 1980), a collaboration between the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and UNEP, which aimed at prioritising conservation issues and defining key policy options. In 1983, the United Nations convened the World Commission on Environment and Development, comprised of representatives from developed and developing countries and chaired by then Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, to address growing concerns over the ‘accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural resources and the consequences of that deterioration for economic and social development’; in 1987, the Commission produced its landmark report ‘Our Common Future’, also known as ‘the Brundtland report’, see www.un-documents.net/our-common-future.pdf.
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2 Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (Annex I), of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro, 1992) www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm.
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