Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : The concept of Sustainable Development was popularised by the Brundtland Report.
Reason (R

Question

Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : The concept of Sustainable Development was popularised by the Brundtland Report.
Reason (R) : The Brundtland Report is also known as "The Limits to Growth".
Select the correct answer from the codes given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, (A) is true but (R) is false. Take them one at a time, which is what an assertion-reason item demands. The Assertion is true. The World Commission on Environment and Development, set up by the United Nations General Assembly in 1983 and chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, submitted its report to the UN in 1987. That report gave the world the sentence every candidate should be able to recite — development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs — and it is from this report that 'sustainable development' passed into general political and academic use, carrying on to the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 and eventually to the Sustainable Development Goals. The Reason is false, and falsified by nothing subtler than a title. The Brundtland Report is known as 'Our Common Future'. 'The Limits to Growth' is a different book from a different decade by different authors: published in 1972, commissioned by the Club of Rome, written by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology team led by Donella Meadows, and built on the World3 computer model of population, food, industrial output, resources and pollution. Its argument was also different — that exponential growth on a finite planet would hit physical limits within a century — whereas 'Our Common Future' argued that growth and environmental protection could be reconciled if development were made sustainable. Since (R) is false, options (a) and (c), which need both statements to be true, fall away, and so does (b), which needs (A) to be false. That leaves (d).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option accepts the Reason as true, and it is not. The Brundtland Report's title is 'Our Common Future'; 'The Limits to Growth' is the Club of Rome's 1972 report. Candidates arrive here by a half-memory that both texts are foundational environmental documents and by a rule of thumb that an assertion-reason pair with two plausible-sounding sentences is usually (a) or (b).  (b) Both halves are wrong. The Assertion is true — 'Our Common Future' (1987) is precisely the document credited with popularising sustainable development — and the Reason is false. This is the exact inversion of the correct answer and is the option chosen by a candidate who has the two titles swapped in memory.  (c) It fails at the first test, the truth of (R), so the question of explanation never arises. Even if the title had been right, note that a report's alternative name could not explain why a concept became popular — an alias is not a cause. Checking each statement for truth before ever asking about explanation is the discipline that saves marks in this format.

Concept: Two reports, fifteen years apart, frame the modern environment-and-development debate. 'The Limits to Growth' (1972), commissioned by the Club of Rome and produced by an MIT team led by Donella Meadows using the World3 model, projected that continued exponential growth in population and industrial output would run into resource and pollution limits within a hundred years; it appeared in the same year as the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, out of which UNEP was created. 'Our Common Future' (1987), the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, took the opposite temper: not limits to growth but a different kind of growth, defined as development that meets present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. That report led directly to the UN Conference on Environment and Development at Rio in 1992, to Agenda 21, and through the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals of 2015.

State PCS 2024 Q51 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q51 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer