The Brundtland report – at the roots of environmentalism
In 1987 Gro Harlem Brundtland, Chair of the ‘World Commission on Environment and Development’ (WCED), established in 1983, presented the report ‘Our common future’, known ever since as the ‘Brundtland Report’.
Environmentalism. In 1987 Gro Harlem Brundtland, Chair of the ‘World Commission on Environment and Development’ (WCED), established in 1983, presented the report ‘Our common future’, known ever since as the ‘Brundtland Report’.
That document is considered a milestone for the environmental question. Its pages provide guidelines for sustainable development that are still valid today.
The premise of Brundtland’s analysis is that the world’s environmental problems are essentially due to the great poverty of the global South and to the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption of the North. The first action required will therefore be the implementation of a strategy capable of integrating the needs of development and of the environment. From this comes the definition of ‘sustainable development’, later translated into Italian as ‘sviluppo sostenibile’: ‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.
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The ethical value of this proposition had a great impact on the international debate. It was also thanks to the impetus produced by the Report that in 1989 the UN General Assembly decided to organise a Conference on Environment and Development. Subsequently, in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, a new Earth Summit brought together more than 150 states and was the occasion for drawing up the famous Agenda 21.
The idea of sustainable development outlined by the Report is divided into three parts:
Part 1. Common concerns:
• a threatened future
• towards sustainable development
• the role of the international economy
Part 2. Common challenges
• Population and human resources
• Food security: sustaining the potential
• Species and ecosystems: resources for development
• Energy: choices for environment and development
• Industry: producing more with less
• The urban challenge
Part 3. Common endeavours
• Managing the global commons
• Peace, security, development and the environment
• Towards common action.
The report closes with the Summary of proposed legal principles for environmental protection and sustainable development.
The Brundtland Report adopts the analysis of the Club of Rome of Aurelio Peccei. The Club of Rome, founded in April 1968 by the Italian entrepreneur Aurelio Peccei and the Scottish scientist Alexander King, came to the attention of the world debate with its report on the limits to growth, better known as the Meadows Report, published in 1972. By carefully studying the trends in demographic indicators and in the consumption of energy and natural resources by the global North, the Report reached the conclusion that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources, especially oil, and the planet’s limited capacity to absorb pollutants.
It was in the second half of the 1970s that the first incontrovertible signs of climate change, due to the impact of human activities on the planet’s balance, began to be recorded. This change was already manifesting itself in several natural systems, such as ocean circulation, sea level, the water cycle, the carbon cycle, air quality, natural ecosystems, the productivity of farmland, grasslands and forests, and the abundance and survival of animal and plant species, including microscopic ones.
Five years after the Brundtland Report, in 1992 the Earth Summit, convened by the UN, was held in Rio de Janeiro. At this international summit more than 150 states met to share information on the state of our ‘common home, the Earth’ and to discuss strategies for tackling present and future environmental emergencies. The participating countries signed three agreements that were not binding at international level. The most ‘famous’ is certainly Agenda 21, but there were also the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, the Statement of Principles for the sustainable management of forests) and two legally binding Conventions (on climate change and on biodiversity).
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