Development is a noble aspiration which drives and inspires mankind to do something better than today. Our present state of human advancement or high standard of living due to economic development is a testimony to mankind's perennial endeavor to progress in all spheres of life.Every step of our progress is possible because we are exploiting environment's scarce resources bestowed upon us by Mother Earth for our benefit.After industrial revolution and colonization era ,we have accelerated the pace of resource utilization by unimaginable amount and our greed for more economic growth has resulted into mankind's attempts to tame Mother Nature and tap all her resources unscrupulously,leading to grave damage to the environment.
No doubt our quest for development has brought about progress and prosperity by leaps and bounds in various dimensions,but it has come at a huge environmental cost and bereaved us with socio-economic inequalities. In this hasty quest ,we have crossed the ecological limits and carrying capacity of nature and now started to borrow from the quota of resources which belongs to our posterity.Thus our development has been largely unsustainable and cannot continue in the long run if we continue our present levels of consumption of non-renewable natural resources.Global warming,climate change,desertification,ocean acidification,mass coral bleaching,alarming levels of fatal pollution in air are the major challenges we have posed knowingly or unknowingly by our relentless pursuit for unsustainable economic development.
Burning of wood,coal and then oil,natural gases,petroleum products and haphazard use of water and land resources-all these continue to be our major basket of inputs to drive economic growth.Little did we realize in the beginning that guzzling of such scarce resources on large scale and using polluting technologies would cause irreparable damage to our environment.Humanity's ecological footprint is already more than 1.5. It means that we now require 50% more than the earths area to sustain our consumption of natural resources.This forces many to think whether we should still continue our current pathways to drive economic growth and development which mainly depends on natural resources which are limited or focus all our efforts on saving and reviving our damaged environment.
Development and environmental concern were never meant to be antithetical to each other.In fact ,they both can go hand in hand.It is not a choice that we have to make between development and environment.It is just the nature of economic activities after industrial revolution that we have been forced to choose polluting ad resource-guzzling industries for our prosperity over environmental well being. But thanks to nature's recurring wake-up calls that we, now,are developing technology,based o renewable and sustainable sources that can replace the technologies which damage the environment.
Many argue that not all the industries depend upon renewable energy.Industries such s mining,furniture,paper mills etc. have to depend on exploitation of natural resources.Also switching to renewable energy is currently a costly affair for many and only the rich and technologically advanced nations can afford it at present. Of course we cannot replace all the industries dependent on non renewable energy resources by renewable energy resources overnight.The transition has to be smooth enough to ensure that there are no fault lines occurring in the process.For such industries,the 3R principle is especially of prime importance i.e. reduce our energy and resource consumption,Reuse the resources and recycle of waste. We must strike the right balance of use between conventional and non conventional energy resources and ensure that we do not deprive our future generations of their rightful stake in the resource consumption for their own development.
Economic development is essential for the social upliftment of masses and bringing billions of poverty-stricken people out of desperation and hunger to achieve global welfare.But we cannot continue our current economic models that rely heavily on non renewable resources and cause grave social and economic inequality at the cost of environmental degradation. This is where the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the world at united unions for a 15 years period i.e. from 2016-2030 will help create a synergy between development and environment. The SDGs are a successor to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which were supposed to be achieved between the year 2000 and 2015. But not all the 8 goals envisaged in MDGs could be achieved completely though there have been remarkable achievements in many aspects.
With scarce water and land resources and ever exploding population we must concentrate all our efforts towards optimum and efficient resource use and conservation.Unfortunately,environment had taken a backseat for all these centuries in our myopic quest for climbing the band wagon of economic development and considering nature as our dumping yard for our waste product.Now it is high time that we centered our development around environment by sustainably consuming the resources.
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