WCED: Our Common Future Summary

Part I: LITERATURE REVIEW

Chapter One: Introduction

“It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable” as Jonathan Safran Foer clearly states in his book Eating Animals where he shows the cruelty and the environmental effect from being mainly being carnivores and then using animal skin or parts to produce other consumer goods and market them as healthy and organic products. (Foer, J., 2009)

Why do we need to be sustainable? Why do companies have to release a sustainability report? Is it to influence the stakeholders and the shareholders or it is truly an act of humanity and a wake up call to save the planet?

It was not possible for governments,

The report of the WCED: Our Common Future, written and presented by Gro Harlem Brundtland first explained the link between protecting the environment and ensuring development for which they are both inseparable to ensure an economic growth. Moreover, the report had few definitions of the application of sustainable development, “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (Brundtland, G., March 20, 1987)

The UN Commission’s report focused on two main ideas, the continuation and healthiness of the environment and the people (Strange, T. & Bayley, A. 2009). Furthermore, right after the UN General Assembly, the world witnessed the birth of a new age business strategies and plans for corporations competing to prove to be more sustainable than their competitors in front of their stakeholders and

The latter statement was back up by Detsa Mebartu, a member of the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund University, in the report Sustainability and Sustainable Development: Historical and Conceptual Review, saying that sustainable development has become a weapon to use in manipulating the publics opinion. Furthermore, the sustainable development concept has helped the skew the geographical and social trends around the world and add new elements to the political battle thus allowing powerful parties to control, define and interpret sustainability to their benefit. Thus, the concept behind sustainable development became a tool for governments and political campaigns for politicians, powerful organizations that are controlling the media and even non-governmental organizations to exert fear in the general public’s mind, creating disastrous outcomes that create a more negative than positive effect on sustainable development. The concealing, hiding and altering of information along with the fear of no sustainable future will always comfort governments, politicians and corporations that there will, nonetheless, always be stakeholders who will follow them regardless of their hidden