h1 geography notes

cities in a sustainable future

Sustainable Urban Development Chapter 1: Sustainable Development ● Definition of SD: According to the Brundtland report, SD is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This involves the maximising of goals across economic, environmental and social dimensions ● Concept of “Needs” ○ Essential needs -> food, water, shelter, employment ○ Perceived needs -> demand for electronic devices, overconsumption of food ○ Intragenerational equity needs to be met: at the present , essential needs of the poor must be met ○ Intergenerational equity needs to be met: ensuring essential needs can be met in the long-term ● Interdependency of dimensions: ○ Socio-economic system is dependent on environment as environment provides us with ecological resources and services and acts as a sink for wastes ○ When humans try to maximise the production on one environmental service, there will be unexpected and unwanted declines in provisions of other environmental services ○ Examples: Overfishing -> Collapse of Atlantic cod stocks (coast of Canada in late 20th century); Decline of Mayan civilisation in Central America due to large-scale deforestation, excessive use of soils and over-reliance on maize ○ Challenge in maximising goals across the different dimensions: Many aspects of the environment are not properly valued in economic terms ■ Basically tragedy of the commons (air, oceans, fisheries have transboundary nature so hard to assign value to environmental impact) ● Concept of “Trade-offs” ○ (certain goals have to be compromised for the achievement of others) ○ Another challenge in achieving SD: Institution responsible for managing the environment is institutionally separated from those responsible for the economy ■ Global environment and development has an integrated nature so achievement of SD difficult without a change in how policies are implemented ○ Examples: ■ Biodiversity is disappearing at alarming rates (environmental) but cost of conservation / making areas protected will rise and opportunities for development might be lost (socio-economic)

● however, one solution is for governments to stem the destruction of reservoirs of biological diversity by developing them economically (eg: ecotourism) ■ Industrialization, agricultural development and rapidly growing population of developing nations need a lot of en