A sustainability professor from Roads University in Victoria, BC has proposed a 10-point agenda for a transition to sustainability. Ann Dale suggests a move to an economy of low or zero growth to deliver prosperity while reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities.

Dale writes in Action Agenda: rethinking growth and prosperityhttp://mc3.royalroads.ca/sites/default/files/webfiles/MC3%20Climate%20Action%20Agenda.pdf  that the present economy, based on perpetual growth, rising levels of debt and continuing ecological deficits, cannot continue.

The proposed agenda was developed with input from more than 100 researchers, practitioners, civil society leaders and policy-makers participating in workshops and panels convened by the Canada Research Chair on Sustainability Community Development at Royal Roads. It recommends changing the nature of our development paths, redirecting their trajectories towards a steady state economy of a stable or mildly fluctuating scale.

The agenda calls for measuring well-being, imposing limits on certain practices, moving to a low carbon economy and counting the future value of resources as well as their current value.

We know that more half the world lives in towns and cities, a historic shift marked in 2008.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), about three-quarters of the natural resource consumption takes place in cities, and given current trends, 70 per cent of humanity will live in urban areas by 2050.

The cost of building and renewing urban infrastructure in the world’s cities between 2000 and 2030 is estimated at US$40 trillion.

These are staggering numbers and threaten to drastically increase environmental impacts on an already over-stressed planet.

In a press release, http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=2713&ArticleID=9474&l=en&t=long, UNEP draws from its International Resource Panel http://www.unep.org/resourcepanel/ to look at reducing the environmental impact of cities. It says that greening the ways cities operate can provide economic growth and use fewer resources.

UNEP calls for decoupling urban economic growth from the unsustainable consumption of finite natural resources, which has characterized most urban development to date.

It gives a series of examples from industrial and developing countries to show how current innovations can improve services such as transportation, waste and water while reducing greenhouse gase emissions, and reducing some costs.

The report says a transition to greener cities will be essential “…in an increasingly resource-constrained 21st century.”

The Canadian International Council, on the website http://opencanada.org/ has posted a series of articles under the heading “Do we need sustainable development goals?” The project is a partnership with The North-South Institute, with contributions from the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

The series looks at different ideas about sustainability, if and how sustainability should be integrated into global development goals, particularly the next generation of Millennium Development Goals to be created by the United Nations.

One of the articles, Brundtland Revisited http://opencanada.org/features/the-think-tank/essays/brundtland-revisited/ is written by Jim MacNeill, secretary-general and lead author of Our Common Future. The article is a wake-up call and provides insights into the roots of sustainability. It’s written by someone who was at the centre of developing the sustainable development movement 25 years ago. MacNeill provides a warning about how the concept has been over simplified as people grappled with this complex set of ideas.

The article is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the roots of sustainable development and how we are doing in achieving the goals.

MacNeill sums up changes since the 1980s this way: “…the journey to a more sustainable world is barely underway, even though we have made a significant amount of progress.”

One of the greatest threats, of course, is the continuing increase in demand for the types of energy that are leading to disastrous climate change.

The bright spots are in a reduction in global population growth, many reductions in poverty, increases in freedom and democracy in many countries, gains in in transparency and the growth of civil society.

He feels that to get the real changes needed for sustainability we need aroused public opinion, an active civil society, progressive people in business and enlightened political leadership.

Following the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development in 2012, the United Nations is trying to reach agreement on a new set of long-term sustainable development goals. They are to succeed the eight Millennium Development Goals established by the UN in 2000.

Last month, a group of international scientists has proposed their own goals to try to link poverty eradication to protection of Earth’s life support systems.

The researchers said the millennium goals were successful in some areas: the number of people living on less than one dollar a day has been more than halved. But many goals have not been met, and some remain in conflict with one another. Economic gains, for example, have come at the expense of environmental protection.

They said that people need to see the economy and the broader human society as existing within Earth’s life support system. They suggest six universal sustainable development goals cutting across economic, social and environmental domains:

1. Thriving lives and livelihoods

2. Sustainable food security

3. Secure, sustainable water

4. Universal clean energy

5. Healthy and productive ecosystems

6. Governance for sustainable societies

The goals appear in an article published by the International Geosphere-Biosphere program, a global science program on the changing world.

In 2008, the Canadian government passed the Federal Sustainable Development Act, starting the process of a Federal Sustainable Development Strategy to make environmental decision-making more transparent and accountable.

Environment Canada’s Sustainable Development Office at is looking for input from Canadians, by June 13, on the draft second cycle of the sustainable development strategy, covering the period 2013 to 2016.

The government has also released the 2012 Progress Report on the Federal Sustainable Development Strategy. Although described as a report on federal government strategy, it is in many ways a national report on key environmental sustainability issues. It is a valuable complement to the Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators program.

For details see the Environment Canada sustainable development page at http://www.ec.gc.ca/dd-sd/ and the environmental indicators page at http://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/.

The environment is back in the news after being pushed to the sidelines by the economic crises.

We see stories of droughts, floods, deforestation, overfishing, disappearing species and risky chemicals in our food and water.

At the same time a growing global population has increasing demands for food, water, transportation, energy and material goods.

Much of human development is unsustainable for the long term. We are using too many resources too fast, and dumping too much pollution into the environment.

Can we change course? Can our species evolve one that uses up and soils the world to one that lives comfortably within its ecological means? Or will future generations say we changed too little and too late?

Since The Sustainability Report went online in 1998 it has tracked key issues and trends shaping our environment, health and economy. This report focuses on environmental sustainability, showing the connections with our economy and well-being. The stories tell what is happening, why and what can and is being done to bend the curve of human development toward sustainability.

The report is now relaunched in a simpler blog format that still provides background information on key sustainability issues, combined with news and updates. I want to thank John Chenery for creating the original site and advising on the change, and Rob Dooh of Threestone Studios for creating the new site. I also want to thank many advisors who have guided the evolution of the report over the years.

I hope you find the new report informative and useful.

Michael Keating

The average Canadian is now richer and lives longer than ever before, but the lifestyles, health and economic development of people in Canada and all countries depend on a wide range of ecological goods and services. These include climate regulation, food, fish and timber production, provision of clean air and water, flood control, soil formation and fertility, pollination and biodiversity. Our environment also provides for spiritual, recreational and cultural needs.

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Although there are many examples of sustainability in Canada, there is no overall vision or common approach, despite pleas for one from many sources, including various governments, business leaders and the public.

In the mid-1980s, the World Commission on Environment and Development, known as the Brundtland Commission after its leader, popularized the term sustainable development. Their work inspired a group of Canadian environment ministers, along with industrial, environmental and academic leaders, to create the National Task Force on Environment and Economy. It was a bold and pioneering move that put 17 people with widely divergent views on the environment together in one room. Despite these differences, the group rapidly came to consensus on a wide range of difficult topics.

In its 1987 report, http://www.ccme.ca/assets/pdf/pn_1090_e.pdf the task force said its main objective was to promote environmentally sound economic growth and development. It stated: “The economy and its participants exist within the environment, not outside it; we cannot expect to maintain economic prosperity unless we protect the environment and our resource base, the building blocks of development.”

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Climate change is the most important and difficult environmental sustainability issue facing humanity.

More than 81 per cent of the world’s primary energy supply comes from fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas.

According to the International Energy Agency: “With energy-related carbon dioxide representing the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions, the fight against climate change has become a defining factor for energy policy-making – but the implications are daunting. Meeting the emission goals currently pledged by countries under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would still leave the world some 13.7 billion tonnes of CO₂ – or 60% – above the level needed to remain on track with the 2°C goal in 2035. Much additional investment will need to be directed towards lower- CO₂ technologies, on supply and end-use sides alike. The benefits that society would reap from these measures, beyond avoided climate impacts, would be of an equal if not larger magnitude than the cost to the energy sector.”

Not only is pollution from fossil fuels a major source of climate change, some of the many pollutants also cause tens of thousands of premature deaths plus a great deal of illness around the world.

Can the world make a shift to green energy in time to head off a climate disaster. Canadian writer Stephen Leahy investigates in an article,

http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/02/green-energy-solves-dual-crises-of-poverty-and-climate/ called Green Energy Solves Dual Crises of Poverty and Climate.