Intergenerational Equity &

Sustainable development
Intergenerational Equity

 Intergenerationalequity is a concept that says

that humans 'hold the natural and cultural
environment of the Earth in common both
with other members of the present generation
and with other generations, past and future‘.
 It means that we inherit the Earth from
previous generations and have an obligation to
pass it on in reasonable condition to future
generations.
 The government's ESD (Ecologically Sustainable
Development Working Group) working groups
have argued that, unless substantial change occurs,
the present generation may not be able to pass on
an equivalent stock of environmental goods to the
next generation. This would be due to three
factors:
 Firstly, the rates of loss of animal and plant
species, arable land, water quality, tropical forests
and cultural heritage are especially serious.
 Secondly, and perhaps more widely recognized, is the
fact that we will not pass on to future generations the
ozone layer or global climate system that the current
generation inherited.
 A third factor that contributes overwhelmingly to the
anxieties about the first two is the prospective impact of
continuing population growth and the environmental
consequences if rising standards of material income
around the world produce the same sorts of consumption
patterns that are characteristic of the currently
industrialized countries.
 The other way is to view the environment as
offering more than just economic potential
that cannot be replaced by man-made wealth
and to argue that future generations should not
inherit a degraded environment, no matter
how many extra sources of wealth are
available to them. This is referred to as 'strong
sustainability'.
 In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and
Development (WCED), which had been set up in 1983, published
a report entitled «Our common future». The document came to be
known as the «Brundtland Report» after the Commission's
chairwoman, Gro Harlem Brundtland. It developed guiding
principles for sustainable development as it is generally
understood today.
 The Brundtland Report stated that critical global environmental
problems were primarily the result of the enormous poverty of
the South and the non-sustainable patterns of consumption and
production in the North. It called for a strategy that united
development and the environment – described by the now-
common term «sustainable development».
 Sustainable development is defined as
follows:
 «Sustainable development is development that
meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations
to meet their own needs.»
 In 1989, the report was debated in the UN
General Assembly, which decided to organize
a UN Conference on Environment and
Development.
 The theoretical framework for sustainable development
evolved between 1972 and 1992 through a series of
international conferences and initiatives. The UN
Conference on the Human Environment, held in
Stockholm in 1972, was the first major international
gathering to discuss sustainability at the global scale.
 The conference created considerable momentum, and a
series of recommendations led to the establishment of the
UN Environment Programme (UNEP) as well as the
creation of numerous national environmental protection
agencies at the national level.
 The recommendations from Stockholm were
further elaborated in the 1980 World
Conservation Strategy—a collaboration
between the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature, the World Wildlife
Fund (WWF), and UNEP—which aimed to
advance sustainable development by
identifying priority conservation issues and
key policy options.
 The Brundtland report provided the momentum for
the landmark 1992 Rio Summit that laid the
foundations for the global institutionalization of
sustainable development. Marking the twentieth
anniversary of the Stockholm Conference, the
Earth Summit adopted the Rio Declaration on
Environment and Development and Agenda 21, a
global plan of action for sustainable development.
 The Rio Declaration contained 27 principles of
sustainable development, including principle 7 on
“common but differentiated responsibilities,” which
stated: “In view of the different contributions to global
environmental degradation, States have common but
differentiated responsibilities. The developed countries
acknowledge the responsibility that they bear in the
international pursuit of sustainable development in view
of the pressures their societies place on the global
environment and of the technologies and financial
resources they command.”
 Agenda 21 included 40 separate chapters, setting out
actions in regard to the social and economic dimensions of
sustainable development, conservation and management
of natural resources, the role of major groups, and means
of implementation. In Agenda 21, developed countries
reaffirmed their previous commitments to reach the
accepted UN target of contributing 0.7 percent of their
annual gross national product (GNP) to official
development assistance, and to provide favorable access
to the transfer of environmentally sound technologies, in
particular to developing countries.
 Three seminal instruments of environmental governance were established
at the Rio Summit:
 the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),
 the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and
 the non legally binding Statement of Forest Principles.
 Following a recommendation in Agenda 21, the UN General Assembly
officially created the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD)
The Rio Summit was very successful from a political standpoint: it had
the world’s attention and active engagement and attendance by virtually
every national leader.
 Its challenges lay in two areas: first, too much of an emphasis on the
“environment pillar” in the negotiations and secondly, all too little
implementation of goals established under Agenda 21, particularly those
related to development aid and cooperation.
 Since that time a number of important international
conferences on sustainable development have been
held—
 including the 1997 Earth Summit+5 in New York
and the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable
Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg. These
meetings were primarily reviews of progress; and
reported that a number of positive results had been
achieved, but implementation efforts largely had been
unsuccessful at the national and international level.
Principles of Sustainable Development

 “Health and quality of life”: People, human health and

improved quality of life are at the centre of sustainable
development concerns. People are entitled to a healthy and
productive life in harmony with nature;
 “Social equity and solidarity”: Development must be
undertaken in a spirit of intra- and inter-generational equity
and social ethics and solidarity;
 “Environmental protection”: To achieve sustainable
development, environmental protection must constitute an
integral part of the development process;
 “Economic efficiency”: The economy of any regions
must be effective, geared toward innovation and
economic prosperity that is conducive to social
progress and respectful of the environment;
 “Participation and commitment”: The participation
and commitment of citizens and citizens' groups are
needed to define a concerted vision of development
and to ensure its environmental, social and
economic sustainability;
 “Access to knowledge”: Measures favourable to education, access to
information and research must be encouraged in order to stimulate
innovation, raise awareness and ensure effective participation of the
public in the implementation of sustainable development;
 “Subsidiarity”: Powers and responsibilities must be delegated to the
appropriate level of authority. Decision-making centers should be
adequately distributed and as close as possible to the citizens and
communities concerned;
 “Inter-governmental partnership and cooperation”: Governments
must collaborate to ensure that development is sustainable from an
environmental, social and economic standpoint. The external impact
of actions in a given territory must be taken into consideration
 “Prevention”: In the presence of a known risk, preventive,
mitigating and corrective actions must be taken, with priority given
to actions at the source;
 “Precaution”: When there are threats of serious or irreversible
damage, lack of full scientific certainty must not be used as a
reason for postponing the adoption of effective measures to prevent
environmental degradation;
 “Protection of cultural heritage”: The cultural heritage, made up
of property, sites, landscapes, traditions and knowledge, reflects
the identity of a society. It passes on the values of a society from
generation to generation, and the preservation of this heritage
fosters the sustainability of development. Cultural heritage
components must be identified, protected and enhanced, taking
their intrinsic rarity and fragility into account;
 “Biodiversity preservation”: Biological diversity offers
incalculable advantages and must be preserved for the benefit of
present and future generations. The protection of species, ecosystems
and the natural processes that maintain life is essential if quality of
human life is to be maintained;
 “Respect for ecosystem support capacity”: Human activities must
be respectful of the support capacity of ecosystems and ensure the
perenniality of ecosystems;
 “Responsible production and consumption”: Production and
consumption patterns must be changed in order to make production
and consumption more viable and more socially and environmentally
responsible, in particular through an eco efficient approach that
avoids waste and optimizes the use of resources;
 “Polluter pays”: Those who generate pollution or
whose actions otherwise degrade the environment
must bear their share of the cost of measures to
prevent, reduce, control and mitigate
environmental damage;
 “Internalization of costs”: The value of goods
and services must reflect all the costs they generate
for society during their whole life cycle, from their
design to their final consumption and their
disposal.
 These principles and other comparable ones are
integrated into the practices of a growing number of
government agencies, non-profit or private organizations
and those working in fields such as education , business ,
architecture and construction, research and development,
management, etc. They draw inspiration from these
principles to improve their methods with regard to
access to knowledge, production and consumption,
citizen participation and involvement, ecological
responsibility, and the ideas to develop new areas of
intervention.