Today, we’re 7.2 billion people living in our mother earth. We’re up ten times since the start of the industrial revolution. The world is so crowded, divided between wealth and poverty, facing unprecedented environmental challenges and that’s the starting point for understanding sustainable development and its importance.
Sustainable Development tries to answer mainly two questions:
- How the economic, social, environmental, political, cultural systems works and effect each other?
that discipline finds a way to understand this complicated world. In order to develop something, first need is to define and analyze the current system. It is a puzzle with 4 pieces: Economic, societal (social inclusion, cultural etc.), natural environment, political systems. How do economic, social, environmental and government systems interact?
2. How do we make the world both prosperous fair and also environmentally sustainable?
The aim is to develop sensible goals for this crowded & interconnected earth so that our economy don’t overrun the physical planet itself. This is what we call normative or ethical approach, identifying goals for society. Thinking of what a good society should be with a holistic approach
Can we say a rich society is a good society? Only by looking from economic approach? That’s not quite right when the country is rich on the average but the wealth is held by very few people and the others are really poor. Economic wealth must shared among regions of a country, among different racial or ethnic groups, and equal to men and women in a country to that we provide social inclusion.
A society must protect its natural environment, biodiversity, climate. We’re losing immeasurably by destroying oceans, forests etc. Societies must immediately quit the path that fundamentally changes the Earth’s climate. In a normative way, if we care about our children well being, sustainable environmental development is a must thing.
Where the politicans are not to be trusted, people living with massive corruption and lawlessness we can not talk about sustainable development either. People feel better when they can trust their government all around the world.
So good society, is not only a wealthy society.
It is prosperous, socially inclusive, environmentally sustainable and well governed society. And the sustainable development is a shared goal for the planet.
