Sustainable Development Essay -- essays research papers

Sustainable Development By the year 2200 there will be a lot more people living on this planet then there are now. Estimates range anywhere from 15 to 36 billion people. Where will these people live? How will they live? The answer is sustainable development. Sustainable development, "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. " It also, "requires meeting the basic needs of all peoples and extending to them the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations for a better life. A world in which poverty is endemic will always be prone to ecological and other catastrophes." Sustainable development is being ignored in Chile, the Philippines, and Siberia, practiced in Madagascar and in Alaska, and examined in the Lake Baikal region of Russia. These Countries must learn from each other's failures and success to discover what sustainable development involves in their own country. Sustainable development has three divisions, economic, environmental, and social. If sustainability is to occur it must, meet these three divisions. In Chile, none of these divisions is being met. Economically speaking, almost 40% of the population is poor and as a result many make a living directly from the land clearing forests. In the IVth region of Chile, forest regions are being depleted at an amazing rate. This depletion of the forest in this region results in two main things, one, people must spend increasing amounts of energy traveling to the site of present cutting and two, the removal of the trees over time has lead to soil erosion and rapid desertification of the area. This soil erosion also removes many nutrients from the soil making the land poor for agriculture. The third division, social, is not met here either. The lack of organizations to relieve the negative effects of poverty on the environment have only contributed to the problem. In the Philippines the environmental degradation is similar in nature but more catastrophic in result. There in the province of Leyte 6000 people were killed when flash flood ripped through Ormoc City in 1991. The floods were a result of logging of a forest in that region and conversion of that area into commercial farming practices such as sugarcane. This in itself did not... ...lace on earth it was necessary to account for all three area's of sustainability. This was accomplished by zoning the entire Lake Baikal watershed into 25 different types of zones ranging from farmland to industrial parks. A total of 52 million acres were set aside as parks, reserves, greenbelts, and landscapes. As well as zoning the entire basin, an agreement was struck to reduce and hopefully end the pollution that enters Lake Baikal's watershed. In this way, not only was the environment saved, but so were peoples jobs and thus the social and economic well-being. The Lake Baikal zoning method is an example of how new methods of sustainable development are always being created. Countries like Chile, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe all can learn a lot from examples such as Madagascar, the United States, and the zoning method in Russia. In fact all countries can learn a lot from the success and failures of each other. In every successful case of sustainable development the three aspects were met, economical, environmental, and social. In every failure at least one or more was missing. The lessons learned now can only help us as we enter the next millennia, and over 15 billion people.