Sustainable Development

"Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable — to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
— World Commission on Environment and Development (also known as the Brundtland Commission), 1987

	"Appropriate technology is usually characterized as being small scale, energy efficient, environmentally sound, labor intensive, and controlled by the local community ..."

Breaking new ground in the 1980s, "sustainable development" concepts emerged to synthesize environmental, social and economics issues, and the Brundtland definition lays the foundation for most. More recent definitions attempt to give fuller meaning to intergenerational values and provide a better understanding of the scope for diverse local, regional and global perspectives. Examples:

"Sustainability occurs when we maintain or improve the material and social conditions for human health and the environment over time without exceeding the ecological capabilities that support them."
— EPA's National Risk Management Research Laboratory (Research Highlights, December 2003)

"Sustainable Development: A real increase in well-being and standard of life for the average person that can be maintained over the long-term without degrading the environment or compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
— Environmental Science: A Global Concern, 7/e (McGraw Hill, 1999) online glossary

Appropriate technology

Since the mid-1970s, growing interest in the concept of "appropriate technology" — as a means of addressing the challenges of poverty and adversity — has helped to define questions of locality amid the borderless and increasingly complex global marketplace, and it is an intricate part of the equation for sustainable development. Some definitions:

"Appropriate technology is usually characterized as being small scale, energy efficient, environmentally sound, labor intensive, and controlled by the local community. It must be simple enough to be maintained by the people using it. Furthermore, it must match the user and the need in complexity and scale and must be designed to foster self-reliance, cooperation and responsibility."
— Engineers without Borders

"Appropriate Technology: Technology that can be made at an affordable price by ordinary people using local materials to do useful work in ways that do the least possible harm to both human society and the environment."
— Environmental Science: A Global Concern, 7/e (McGraw Hill, 1999) online glossary

Note the sustainability and appropriate-technology aims in this definition for "environmentally sound technologies":

"Techniques and technologies capable of reducing environmental damage through processes and materials that generate fewer potentially damaging substances, recover such substances from emissions prior to discharge, or utilize and recycle production residues. The assessment of these technologies should account for their interaction with the socio-economic and cultural conditions under which they are implemented. "
— United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Statistics Division, "Environmental Glossary"