Environment and Sustainable Development

Our lives on this planet depend on nature’s provision of stability and resources. Current rates of human-engendered environmental destruction threaten those resources and leave death and misery in their wake. But we can avoid this. To do so, we must act in concert and with a sense of urgency to make the structural and policy changes needed to maintain ecosystems and their services, control water and air pollution, and reverse the trends leading to global warming. This must be done if we are to achieve the level of environmental sustainability necessary

to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals addressing poverty, illiteracy, hunger, discrimination against women, unsafe drinking water, and environmental degradation. Page 1.

By environmental sustainability we mean meeting current human needs without undermining the capacity of the environment to provide for those needs over the long term. Achieving environmental sustainability requires carefully balancing human development activities while maintaining a stable environment that predictably and regularly provides resources such as freshwater, food, clean air, wood, fisheries, and productive soils and that protects people from floods, droughts, pest infestations, and disease. Therefore, environmental sustainability is necessarily a fundamental objective in the pursuit of the seven other Millennium Development Goals.

In Environment and Human Well Being: A practical selection

 UN Millennium Project

Available at page 1. http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/documents/EnvironSust_summary.pdf