Why is sustainable development so important?
Our current approach to development is unsustainable, we are overexploiting resources and creating pollution, changing habitats and driving species to extinction. Research has highlighted that if everyone in the world lived the way we do in Europe we would need three planets to support us. Unsustainable development also creates social problems which are exacerbated by the inequalities in health, wealth, education and employment which accompany it. It is now almost universally accepted that global climate change is a reality and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are a contributory factor. The Stern Review, on the economics of climate change, outlined the costs of inaction in addressing the problem of climate change. It forecast that spending one per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) now on tackling climate change would help preclude a loss of up to 20% global GDP and avoid almost certain global economic disaster. The report also outlined the human cost of massive social
