Dead ends and liveable futures : a framework for sustainable change

• The lack of organised human effort to change the course of unsustainable development can be characterised 'Our common failure'. In 1987, the Brundtland commission successfully made famous the concept of sustainable development, but unfortunately also legitimised the idea of weak sustainability. Even though people around the world are increasingly exposed to the discourse and initiatives of sustainable development, little – if any – evidence is available today to indicate that human societies would be on the 'right track'. That is, humankind is not any less environmentally destructive than it was in the 1980s. In fact, the opposite can be considered to be true. All the way back from the Industrial Revolution, the overall amount of production and consumption has risen more rapidly than improvements in efficiency, which signifies that more natural resources are used and more human-induced waste (e.g. climate emissions) are generated than ever in the recorded history of the Earth (Rockström et al., 2009; Barnosky et al., 2012; IPCC, 2014). Further, the expansion of human settlements and excessive mobility on the planet has resulted in an unseen invasion of this single species of ours, and its domination over the rest of nature. This process, which is sometimes also referred to as the Great Acceleration, has come to denote that humankind is now a main driver of the global environmental change, including the sixth mass extinction wave (Steffen et al., 2015; Ceballos et al., 2015).

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Geovetenskap och miljövetenskap -- Miljövetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Earth and Related Environmental Sciences -- Environmental Sciences (hsv//eng)

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