Our Common Future
"Our Common Future," also known as the Brundtland Report, is a pivotal document published in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development, led by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a notable advocate for environmentalism and former Prime Minister of Norway. This report emerged from the recognition that pressing environmental challenges, such as pollution, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss, could not be effectively addressed by individual nations acting alone. Instead, it argued for a multilateral approach to tackle these global issues, emphasizing the interconnectedness of nations and the importance of sustainable development—a term coined within the report itself.
The Brundtland Report posits that economic development and environmental protection must coexist to ensure the well-being of present and future generations. It calls for international cooperation, particularly highlighting the need to address the challenges faced by poorer nations, and advocates for a comprehensive strategy that transcends traditional political and economic boundaries. Although not all of its predictions have materialized, "Our Common Future" has been influential in shaping international environmental policies and agreements in subsequent decades, laying the groundwork for significant initiatives such as the Earth Summit and various global environmental protocols. The report continues to serve as a foundational reference in discussions about sustainable practices and global environmental governance.
On this Page
Our Common Future
IDENTIFICATION: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development that focused on multilateral global cooperation as the most effective way to address growing environmental crises
DATE: Published in 1987
Through Our Common Future, the World Commission on Environment and Development gave support to the idea that pressing environmental concerns must be addressed through a concerted international effort that balances the need for economic development with the necessity of protecting and preserving the environment.
By the early 1980s, environmental activists had begun to recognize that individual nations could have little long-term impact in their attempts to address the most significant issues related to the environment, among them air, soil, and water pollution, diminishment of food and water supplies, loss, and species extinction. They came to believe that nations needed to reorient their perceptions of how to go about protecting the earth’s resources. Visionary politicians, scientists, and conservationists turned to the United Nations to promote an international effort to address environmental issues.
In 1983, the United Nations established the World Commission on Environment and Development, an international committee of twenty-two members headed by Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway (she would be reelected to the office in 1986); Brundtland had long been a passionate advocate for environmentalism. The commission, commonly known as the Brundtland Commission, was to project the course of global environmental development to the year 2000. Brundtland conceived an ambitious agenda: The commission would develop broad recommendations for how humanity might begin to address the damages caused to the planetary by unchecked industrial development. The commission dedicated its efforts to defining a radical new vision in which human affairs could be reconciled with natural processes—the inability to seek such reconciliation, the commission warned, would have bleak consequences.
Under Brundtland’s direction, the commission’s landmark report, published in 1987 as Our Common Future and commonly referred to as the Brundtland Report, centered on the concept of sustainable development, focusing on how economic development and environmentalism might (and indeed must) work in concert so that the economic needs of the present would not jeopardize future generations. The report endorsed international cooperation among developed and developing nations, with specific concern for the plight of the poor. The commission boldly conceived of the needed campaign to address environmental concerns as holistic and necessarily global; its report emphasized that nations must move beyond centuries-old assumptions about political, religious, and economic boundaries and conceive of the globe as a single organism, its nations as interdependent, and all the crises affecting the global environment as a single interlocked crisis.
In the decades since the report’s release, many of the commission’s most dire predictions have not come to pass, and efforts to create international cooperation in the face of the urgency of environmental degradation have struggled. Nevertheless, Our Common Future has been credited with laying the philosophical foundation for historic international environmental successes of the 1990s and the 2000s, many under the auspices of the United Nations, most notably the 1992 Earth Summit, the Rio Declaration, the Montreal Protocol, the Kyoto Protocol, Agenda 21, and the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (also known as Rio+20).
Bibliography
Blewitt, John. Understanding Sustainable Development. Sterling: Earthscan, 2008. Print.
Borowy, Iris. Defining Sustainable Development For Our Common Future: A History of the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission). Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Digital file.
Leman-Stefanovic, Ingrid. Safeguarding Our Common Future: Rethinking Sustainable Development. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000. Print.
Rogers, Peter P., Kazi F. Jalai, and John A. Boyd. An Introduction to Sustainable Development. Sterling: Earthscan, 2007. Print.
Walker, Brian, and David Salt. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington, DC: Island, 2006. Print.
World Commission on Environment and Development. Our Common Future. Washington, DC: Author, 1987. Print.