Our Common Future (Brundtland Report)

In late 1983 Gro Harlem Brundtland , the former Prime Minister of Norway, was asked by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to establish and chair the World Commission on Environment and Development, a special, independent commission convened to formulate "a global agenda for change."

The Secretary-General's request emerged from growing concern in the General Assembly about a number of issues, including: long-term sustainable development ; cooperation between developed and developing nations; more effective international management of environmental concerns; the differing international perceptions of long-term environmental issues; and strategies for protecting and enhancing the environment.

The commission worked for three years and produced what is commonly known as "The Brundtland Report." Published in book form in 1987 as Our Common Future, the report addresses what it identifies as "common concerns," such as a threatened future, sustainable development, and the role of the international community. The report also examines "common challenges," including population growth , food security, biodiversity , and energy choices, as well as how to make industry more efficient. Finally, the report lists "common endeavours," such as managing the commons, maintaining peace and security while not suspending development or degrading the environment, and changing institutional and legal structures. A chapter on each one of these concerns, challenges, and endeavors is included in the book.

Two years after publication of the report, Brundtland summarized its findings in a speech to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. The reports's core concepts, she explained, were "that development must be sustainable, and the environment and world economy are totally, permanently intertwined." She went on to assert that these concepts "transcend nationality, culture, ideology, and race." She summarized by repeating the report's urgent warning: "Present trends cannot continue. They must be reversed."

The Brundtland Report issued a multitude of recommendations to help attain sustainable development and to address the problems posed by a global economy that is intertwined with the environment. The report recommends ways to deal with the debt crisis in developing nations, and insists on linking poverty and environmental deterioration: "A world in which poverty is endemic will always be prone to ecological and other catastrophes." The report also argues that security issues should be defined in environmental rather than military terms.

The members of the commission felt that a vast array of institutional changes were necessary if progress was to be made, and the report addresses these issues. It declares that the problems confronting the world are all tied together, "yet most of the institutions facing those challenges tend to be independent, fragmented, working to relatively narrow mandates with closed decision processes." Much of the work done by the commission focused on policy issues such as long-term, multifaceted population policies and ways to create effective incentive systems to encourage production, especially of food crops. Recommendations also include methods for a successful transition from fossil fuels to "low-energy" paths based on renewable resources.

The report repeatedly notes the differences between developed and developing nations in terms of energy use, environmental degradation , and urban growth, but it also emphasizes that "specific measures must be located in a wider context of effective [international] cooperation, if the problems are to be solved." The report always brings the problems back to people, to the importance of meeting basic human needs and the necessity of decreasing the disparities between developed and developing countries: "All nations will have a role to play in changing trends, and in righting an international economic system that increases rather than decreases inequality, that increases rather than decreases numbers of poor and hungry."

The report is not merely a grim listing of "ever increasing environmental decay, poverty, and hardship in an ever more polluted world among ever decreasing resources." Surprising to some, it is also a documentation of "the possibilities for a new era of economic growth," an on-going era of sustainable, non-destructive growth.

See also Economic growth and the environment; Environmental economics; Environmental monitoring; Environmental policy; Environmental stress; Green politics; International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme; United Nations Earth Summit; United Nations Environment Programme; World Bank

[Gerald L. Young Ph.D. ]

RESOURCES

BOOKS

Silver, C. S., and R. S. DeFries. One Earth One Future: Our Changing Global Environment. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1990.

World Commission on Environment and Development. Our Common Future. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.