Meaning of Sustainable Development

Abstract

The Club of Rome was the first organization to use the term “sustainable” in its 1972 report titled The Limits to Growth, written by a group of scientists led by Dennis and Donnella Meadows. Describing the desirable “state of global equilibrium,” the authors wrote, “We are searching for a model output that represents a world system that is: (1) sustainable without sudden and uncontrolled collapse; and (2) capable of satisfying the basic material requirements of all of its people.”1 But developing a world system where a state of equilibrium prevails requires balancing economic production, peoples’ actions and desires, and nature’s ability to renew depleted resources, when no one is able to determine the feasible rate of resource extraction or the actual rate of resource renewal or to control people’s actions.