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Whatever its limitations, the original report made a significant impact on public debate and environmental activism. It made many more people aware of the damaging consequences of industrial development and technology, as well as warning about the perils of allowing pollution to increase. The report was an important catalyst for the modern environmental movement (for a wider discussion, see chapter 20, ‘Politics, Government and Social Movements’). Twenty years later, the team published Beyond the Limits (1992), an even more pessimistic report, castigating the world’s politicians for wasting the time, arguing that ecological ‘overshoot’ was already occurring. Then, in 2004, their 30-Year Update was released, arguing that, although some progress had been made in environmental awareness and technological development, the evidence of global warming, declining fish stocks, and much more, showed a world ‘overshooting’ its natural limits. This conclusion was also that of the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Board of 2005, which is tellingly titled Living Beyond our Means. The basic conclusion from the original Limits report and its updates continues to resonate.

Following the publication of Our Common Future, ‘sustainable development’ came to be widely used by both environmentalists and governments. It was employed at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and has subsequently appeared in other meetings organized by the UN, such as the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. Sustainable development is the overarching UN framework covering a series of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) goals for the period 2015 to 2030, including the elimination of poverty and hunger, gender equality, clean water and good sanitation for all, responsible consumption and production, protecting life on land, and taking action on climate change (UN 2019b).

For more on the global development, see chapter 6, `Global Inequality’.

Critics see the concept of sustainable development as too vague, neglecting the specific needs of poorer countries. It has been argued that the concept tends to focus attention only on the needs of richer countries; it does not consider how high levels of consumption in the more affluent countries are satisfied at the expense of people in developing countries. For instance, demands on Indonesia to conserve its rainforests could be seen as unfair, because Indonesia has a greater need than the industrialized countries for the revenue it must forgo.

Linking the concept of ecological sustainability to that of economic development appears contradictory. This is particularly pertinent where sustainability and development clash – for example, when considering new roads or retail sites, it is often the case that the prospect of new jobs and economic prosperity means sustainability takes second place, especially in times of economic recession. This is even more pronounced for governments in developing countries, which are badly in need of more economic activity. In recent years, ideas of environmental justice and ecological citizenship have come to the fore (as we see below), partly as a result of the severe problems associated with the concept and practice of sustainable development.

It is easy to be sceptical about the future prospects for sustainable development. Its aim of finding ways of balancing human activity with sustaining natural ecosystems may appear impossibly utopian. Nonetheless, sustainable development looks to create common ground among nation-states and connects the world development movement with the environmental movement in a way that no other project has yet managed to do. It gives radical environmentalists the opportunity to push for full implementation of its widest goals, but, at the same time, moderate campaigners can be involved locally and exert some influence. A more technology-focused approach, which may be seen as close to the sustainable development project, is known as ecological modernization, and we introduce this in the next section.