Concept Of Sustainable Development

As urban and industrial infrastructures around the globe continue to grow at alarming rates, there is an increasing amount of pressure being applied to local and foreign governments to provide solutions to the problems that are attributed to this growth, the most prominent among them being concerns to do with poverty, inequality, and the environmental implications. A popular and widely considered idea known as sustainable development has created debate amongst world leaders as to the sustaining of finite resources to provide for future generations, but how is the concept of sustainable development shaping our outlook at the design and approach to future and infrastructures and their implications on environmental and socio-economic issues? Can

For the purposes of this paper I will be focusing on The United Nations World Commission on Environment and Developments’ (WCED) definition (Commision, 1987), “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ This, in a broad sense, means that sustainable development is a systems approach to growth and development and to manage natural, produced, and social capital for the welfare of their own and future generations.
For most of the last couple of hundred years the environment has been largely seen as external to humanity, for the most part to be used and exploited, with the exception of a few specially preserved areas as wilderness or parks. For the most part the relationship between people and the environment was perceived as humanity’s triumph over nature, the view that human knowledge and technology could overcome all obstacles including natural and environmental ones (Dryzek,

What seems like a simple choice can have a massive impact on a large scale. In areas much like India, Africa, and China vast areas are piled high with consumer waste products ranging from food packaging through to what has been dubbed ‘e-waste’ by several public policy advocates. These mountains of material that have been discarded by the buyer rather than recycled, are dismantled and disposed of in waste processing plants, but there are environmental impacts that occur during the process. Liquid and atmospheric releases end up in bodies of water, groundwater, soil, and air and therefor in land and sea animals both domesticated and wild, and in crops eaten by both animals and humans (Frazzoli, 2010). One such case was observed in Guiya, China (Sthiannopkao, 2012) where levels of carcinogens in duck ponds and rice paddies exceeded international standards for agricultural areas and cadmium, copper, nickel, and lead levels in rice paddies were above international