Sustainable Development

How important is it to understand data?
Knowing your data is vital to preservation. Data allows us to analyze our past our present and possible future position. As cited in Hans Rosling’s presentation pointed out that overtime, well maintained data can highlight our past, present and future existence. As well as, this data if analyze correctly shows the progress and lack thereof of humanity.

What does sustainable development mean to you?

Just as a prism displays different colors when you turn it, so too, does sustainable development. Its colors are environmental, economic and social.

I think that sustainable development is a development pattern in which the choices of present generation are inflated without restricting the choices of future generations. In essence sustainable development highlights the need for meeting the needs of the present generation, without compromising the ability of future generations to do so. Sustainable development implies that:

• Enlargement of human choices at any point would depend on economic, political, social, institutional and environmental contexts. Thus sustainability encompasses more than environment.
• The concept of sustainability is a dynamic inter-generational notion
• The abstract concept of sustainable development needs to be operational, which requires, among other things, measurable indicators and quantifiable targets, a framework for inter-temporal cost benefit analysis.

Development becomes sustainable if it is sustained on several fronts, social, economic, and environmental. And it is the interaction of all these dimensions that makes sustainability real. Sustainability can be linked to all forms of capital, natural, economic and social, and their reproduction. Natural resources and their reproduction is a key to environmental sustainability. Economic capital, e.g. labor and its reproduction is needed for economic sustainability and social capital, i.e. bondage, interaction and relationships among human beings within a society, is also a prerequisite for sustainability.

How can you measure sustainable development?

Sustainable development can be measured by what is called indicators. An indicator is something that helps you understand where you are, which way you are going and how far you are from where you want to be. A good indicator alerts you to a problem before it gets too bad and helps you recognize what needs to be done to fix the problem. Indicators of a sustainable community point to areas where the links between the economy, environment and society are weak. They allow you to see where the problem areas are and help show the way to fix those problems. I must say that indicators of sustainability are different from traditional indicators of economic, social, and environmental progress. Traditional indicators, such as stockholder profits, asthma rates, and water quality, measure changes in one part of a community as if they were entirely independent of the other parts. Sustainability indicators reflect the reality that the three different segments are very tightly interconnected, as shown in the figure above.
In order for an indicator to be effective, they must be relevant, easy to understand, reliable, based on accessible data.

Do you think it is important in terms of address the eight goals of MDGs? Explain.

If the world can halve extreme poverty, adequately feed its people, ensure universal access to safe water, reduce child mortality and maternal mortality by two-thirds and three-fourths respectively, can enroll all its children in school, can reverse environmental degradation and onslaught of HIV/AIDS, it will ensure sustainable development.

Meeting the MDGs, a country will need political, socio-economic and environmental sustainability. For example, legal discrimination towards certain groups in society that prohibits them from having access to safe water will make the goal of halving people without access to safe water by 2015 difficult, if not impossible. Persistent gender discrimination can also make several MDGs beyond reach of the society. Unequal access to productive resources will hold back a society from achieving the goal of halving extreme poverty. Systematic environmental deprivation in any society would not allow it to reach the goal of reversing loss of environmental resources.

Sustainable development and achievements of MDGs are thus mutually reinforcing. They represent a two-way relationship – where achievement of MDGs helps achieving sustainable development and where the presence of sustainability in its various dimensions is needed for achievement of the time-bound MDGs.

References
http://www.womensgroup.org/SUSD.html
http://www.sei.org/sustainable_development.html
http://www.oecd.org/topic/0,2686,en_2649_37425_1_1_1_1_37425,00.html