Sustainable Development
Note: I gave a speech on Sustainable Development during my college days and here is the transcript.
Sustainable Development
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
How do you feed a city?
This is one of the greatest questions of our time and it is rarely asked.
Everyday food comes as if magically, feeding billions.
Imagine every day a country the size of India needs food.
Food has to be produced, packed, transported, sold, cooked, eaten, and disposed of. And the same has to happen every day in every city, every state, country on earth.
How do we manage the difference between demand and supply?
In this context Mahatma Gandhi rightly said
“This Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need not every man’s greed”
The topic that I will be discussing today is “Sustainable Development”. And I presume that you know what sustainable development means if not let me help.
Sustaining means to support or to maintain. And development means to build on. So Sustainable Development means developing or building but still maintaining a balance of course in the environment.
What is Sustainable development?
Sustainable Development is a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
It contains within it two key concepts. And it is often interpreted as mutually advancing the goals of prosperity, environment, and society.
The concept of Sustainable development can be understood better in this way The world we see is a System, a system that connects space and a system that connects time.
When we think of the world as a system over space, we grow to understand that air pollution from America affects air quality in Asia and that pesticides sprayed in Argentina could harm fish stocks off the coast of Australia.
When we think of the world as a system over time, we start to realize that the decisions our grandparents made about how to farm the land continue to affect agriculture practice today. And the economic policies today will have an impact on urban poverty when today’s children are adults.
In other words, sustainable development means developing a city and using all the natural resources but yet saving the natural resources for future generations.
Sustainable development means economic growth together with the protection of Environmental Quality.
Humans must take no more from nature than needed.
The guiding rules are that people must share and care for the earth. The goal of environmental sustainability is to minimize environmental degradation. Sustainable development encourages three general policy areas Economic, environmental, and social.