Thomas M. Parris

What is Sustainable Development? Goals, Indicators, Values, and Practice

(2005). What is Sustainable Development? Goals, Indicators, Values, and Practice. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development: Vol. 47, No. 3, pp. 8-21.

Long-term trends and a sustainability transition.

How do long-term global trends affect a transition to sustainability? We emphasize the “multitrend” nature of 10 classes of trends, which makes them complex, contradictory, and often poorly understood. Each class includes trends that make a sustainability transition more feasible as well as trends that make it more difficult. Taken in their entirety, they serve as a checklist for the consideration of global trends that impact place-based sustainability studies.

Characterizing a sustainability transition: Goals, targets, trends, and driving forces

Sustainable development exhibits broad political appeal but has proven difficult to define in precise terms. Recent scholarship has focused on the nature of a sustainability transition, described by the National Research Council as meeting the needs of a stabilizing future world population while reducing hunger and poverty and maintaining the planets life-support systems. We identify a small set of goals, quantitative targets, and associated indicators that further characterize a sustainability transition by drawing on the consensus embodied in internationally negotiated agreements and plans of action. To illustrate opportunities for accelerating progress, we then examine current scholarship on the processes that influence attainment of four such goals: reducing hunger, promoting literacy, stabilizing greenhouse-gas concentrations, and maintaining fresh-water availability. We find that such analysis can often reveal “levers of change,” forces that both control the rate of positive change and are subject to policy intervention.

Gender and Sustainable Development

Foreword Sustainable development can only be achieved through long-term investments in economic, human and environmental capital. At present, the female half of the worlds human capital is undervalued and underutilised the world over. As a group, women – and their potential contributions to economic advances, social progress and environmental protection – have been marginalised. Better use of the worlds female population could increase economic growth, reduce poverty, enhance societal well-being, and help ensure sustainable development in all countries. Closing the gender gap depends on enlightened government policies which take gender dimensions into account. This report is a contribution by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) and its cross-cutting work on gender. It aims to increase understanding of the role of women in maintaining the three pillars – economic, social and environmental – of sustainable development. The report has been prepared by the OECD Horizontal Programme on Sustainable Development and is based largely on OECD analyses. The data pertain primarily to the situation of women in OECD countries, but the insights and policy implications are applicable to all countries. The report illustrates how gender mainstreaming in statistics, studies and statutes can lead to more sustainable government policies and a better world economy.

Accelerating Sustainable Development

By this time, most readers may have noticed the expanded focus and new design of Environment as we become a magazine of science and policy for sustainable development. What may be less clear is how the world is coping with its attainment. Two sets of widely recognized sustainable development goals—in the short term (2015), those of the United Nations Millennium Declaration, and in the long term (2050), those of the sustainability transition of the world’s Academies of Science—appear to be doable in theory but under current practice are well out of reach. To mark the millennium, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a set of 60 short-term goals that fall under seven overarching categories, including development, hunger, and poverty; the environment; and Africa’s specific needs. Many of these goals have specific targets, such as cutting hunger in half or insuring universal primary school education by 2015. Progress has been made in cutting poverty but less so in hunger—and in Africa, poverty and hunger keep rising. When the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Board on Sustainable Development first reviewed the complexity of the sustainable development literature, it concluded, “The primary goals of a transition toward sustainability over the next two generations should be to meet the needs of a much larger stabi

Toward a Sustainabiliy Transition The International Consensus

Abstract Sustainable development requires efforts to maintain Earths life-support systems and meet human needs. But how can we make a transition to more sustainable behaviors, and how can we measure progress toward this transition? In reviewing the existing body of international agreements and plans of action, some consensus on goals and targets can be identified. Common indicators for a range of scales must be used to measure progress quantitatively.

Corporate Sustainability Reporting

Corporations are important actors in achieving a transition to sustainability. They produce a large share of the goods and services associated with economic development. In the process, they consume large quantities of energy and materials and generate large volumes of waste—activities associated with environmental degradation. Corporate governance and labor practices also influence broader issues of justice and equity. Fortunately, many of the world’s largest companies have recognized their roles in achieving a sustainability transition, and the potential profitability that this creates. As a result, they have initiated efforts to assess and report on the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of their activities, products, and services. The results are published as annual corporate sustainability reports. The structure and accounting practices for corporate financial reports are tightly regulated by government authorities and professional standards of practice. Similar, but less mature, standards are now emerging for corporate sustainability reports. The development of these standards is coordinated by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI, http://www .globalreporting.org/). GRI publishes reporting guidelines, technical protocols for indicators, and sector supplements that provide guidance for specific industries (such as mining and metals or telecommunications). The current guidelines were published in 2002 (http://www.globalreporting.org/ guidelines/2002.asp) and revised guidelines, known as G3, are due out this year (http://www.grig3.org/). The GRI Web site also provides access to a database of GRI-compliant sustainability reports. GRI works with a number of stakeholder groups such as Ceres (http://www.ceres.org/) and Business for Social Responsibility (http://www.bsr.org/). Ceres is a United States–based “network of investment funds, environmental organizations and other public interest groups working to advance environmental stewardship on the part of businesses.” Business for Social Responsibility is a “global organization that helps member companies achieve success in ways that respect ethical values, people, communities and the environment.” Several organizations publish annual surveys of corporate sustainability reports to rank corporate sustainability performance and identify trends, strengths, and weaknesses. The Roberts Environmental Center at Claremont McKenna College has created the Pacific Sustainability Index (http://www .roberts.mckenna.edu/psi/whatthescoresmean.asp) based on “environmental and social disclosure and performance presented by companies on their web sites. It is based on a combination of existing reporting guidance documents and certification materials and covers 140 topics.” Similarly, the accounting firm KPMG publishes occasional surveys of corporate sustainability reporting (http://www.kpmg.ca/en/industries/enr/energy/ globalSustainabilityReports.html) as does the consulting firm Sustainability (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/ reporting.asp, free registration required). Perhaps most importantly, the socially responsible investment community uses corporate sustainability reports and other information to steer their investment decisions. Examples include the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World (http://www.global100.org/), published by Corporate Knights and Innovest Strategic Value Advisors; the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (http://www.sustainability-index.com/); and the Calvert Ratings (http://www.calvert.com/sri_ calvertratings.html).

Managing Transboundary Environments

Abstract A well-established mantra of international environmental policy has been that “pollution knows no boundaries.” While much of the attention of the last decade has been focused on global environmental treaties such as the Framework Convention on Climate Change (http://unfccc.int) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (http://www.biodiv.org), there has also been a renewed emphasis on bilateral or regional efforts to manage transboundary environments—regions and resources that cross national boundaries. This article highlights some of these efforts, particularly those with strong Internet presence.

Bytes of note: Tools for Environmental Emergency Response

E nvironmental accidents are a fact of life. In 1984, the release of methyl isocynate from Union Carbides pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, killed more than 2,000 people and critically injured more than 50,000. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez spilled approximately 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound, affecting roughly 1,300 miles of shoreline and killing an estimated 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, and up to 22 killer whales (http://www.oilspill.state.ak.us/ facts/qanda.html). While accidents of such magnitude are relatively infrequent, lesser accidents are more common. Accident prevention is the best approach, but response preparation also is necessary for both big and small emergencies. An important component of environmental emergency response preparation is the ability to perform quick assessment of environmental risk resulting from accidental spills or intentional acts of sabotage. Such assessment requires the ability to estimate the movement of released contaminants through the environment to human populations and other valued environmental components (such as habitat for rare or endangered species) as well as the impacts of those contaminants. While there are many models that predict the transport and fate of chemicals in the environment, simplified tools are required so that in an emergency, responders can rapidly produce assessments with existing, precompiled data and readily available on-site observations. This article highlights selected emergency response tools that have been developed to assess airborne taxies, coastalzone oil spills, river spills, and groundwater contamination.

Bytes of note: Managing Persistent Organic Pollutants

ore than 40 years ago, Rachel Carson (http://www. rachelcarson.org/) alerted the M world to the dangers of the pesticide DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) with the publication of Silent Spring (http://w ww.nrdc.org/healthlpesticides/ hcarson.asp). Use of DDT was eventually banned in the United States in 1972 (http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/ddt/ O2.htm) but is still used in other parts of the world primarily for mosquito control. DDT is just one member of a broader class of chemicals known as persistent organic pollutants, or POPs. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), POPs are characterized by their resistance to photochemical, biological, and chemical degradation. As a result, they are transported through the atmosphere and ocean currents and have been found in relatively high concentrations in Arctic (http://www.amap.no/assess/ AP2OOZPOPs.pdf) and Antarctic regions (http://www.chem.unep.chlpts/regreports/ Antarctica%2Ofull% 2Oreport.pdf). Furthermore, they often have low water solubility and high lipid solubility that leads to their bioaccumulation in fatty tissues (http://pops.gpa. unep.org/Olwhat.htm). In addition to DDT, POPs include pesticides such as chlordane, industrial chemicals such as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), and unwanted byproducts from industrial processes such as dioxins. Spurred in part by the 1996 publication of Our Stolen Future (http://www. ourstolenfuture.org/)/), international concern about the environmental and human health impacts of POPs escalated throughout the latter half of the 1990s, culminating with the adoption by Europe and North America of the Aarhus Protocol on Persistent Organic Pollutants (http://www.unece.org/envArtap/ Organic