CDS (II) 2022 General Knowledge · Question 120 of 120

Correct — A, Brundtland Report. The sentence in the stem is the most quoted definition in environmental policy and it comes from Our Common Future, published in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development. The commission was set up by the United Nations in 1983 and chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, then a former and future Prime Minister of Norway, which is why the report is universally known by her name rather than by its title. Its achievement was to fuse two arguments that had been running separately since the 1970s — that the poor world needed development, and that the rich world's growth was wrecking the environment — into a single formula that made intergenerational equity the test. Everything that follows in this field, from Rio in 1992 to the Sustainable Development Goals of 2015, is built on that 1987 sentence.

• (b)United Nations Human Development Report — A different report with a different purpose. The UNDP's Human Development Report began in 1990, three years after Our Common Future, and its contribution is the Human Development Index built on the ideas of Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen — a measure of well-being, not a definition of sustainability.
• (c)Agenda-21 of the Rio Earth Summit — The sharpest distractor, because Agenda 21 is genuinely the action plan of sustainable development — but it was adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992, five years after the definition it applies. The 21 in its name refers to the twenty-first century, not to a year.
• (d)OECD Policy Brief (2006) — Far too late, and the wrong kind of document. By 2006 the Brundtland definition had been in use for nearly twenty years; an OECD policy brief would be quoting it, not coining it.

Sustainable development as Brundtland framed it rests on two ideas contained in the sentence itself: needs, with priority to the essential needs of the world's poor, and limits, imposed by technology and social organisation on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs. It is usually drawn as three interlocking pillars — economic, social and environmental — and its distinctive move is to make fairness between generations, not only within one, a criterion of good policy.

Chronology is what wins this question. Fix four dates and the whole field falls into order: the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, the World Commission on Environment and Development set up in 1983, Our Common Future in 1987, and the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, which produced Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration and the Forest Principles and opened the climate and biodiversity conventions for signature. A definition cannot post-date the plan that applies it, so once you know Agenda 21 belongs to 1992 you know it cannot be the source of a 1987 sentence. The line has since been carried forward into the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015 for the period to 2030, which remain the operative framework today.

• Our Common Future was published in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development.
• The commission was constituted in 1983 and chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, which is why the report carries her name.
• Agenda 21 was adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992; the 21 refers to the twenty-first century.
• Rio 1992 also produced the Rio Declaration and the Forest Principles and opened the UNFCCC and the Convention on Biological Diversity for signature.
• The seventeen Sustainable Development Goals were adopted in 2015 for the period to 2030.

• Attributing the definition to Agenda 21 or to Rio 1992; the sentence is five years older than either.
• Reading the 21 in Agenda 21 as a year.
• Confusing the Human Development Report, which measures well-being, with the Brundtland Report, which defines sustainability.

As a report-to-definition attribution, as a chronology question on environmental milestones, or as an assertion-and-reason pairing the definition with a date.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Agenda 21 was adopted at which conference, and in which year?

  • (a)The Stockholm Conference, 1972
  • (b)The Rio Earth Summit, 1992
  • (c)The Johannesburg World Summit, 2002
  • (d)The Rio+20 Conference, 2012

  Answer(b) The Rio Earth Summit, 1992 — the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development; the 21 in its name refers to the twenty-first century.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The World Commission on Environment and Development, whose 1987 report defined sustainable development, was chaired by

  • (a)Maurice Strong
  • (b)Gro Harlem Brundtland
  • (c)Rachel Carson
  • (d)Indira Gandhi

  Answer(b) Gro Harlem Brundtland — Prime Minister of Norway, after whom the report Our Common Future is popularly named.