Brundtland Commission

Formerly known as the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), the mission of the Brundtland Commission is to unite countries to pursue sustainable development together. The Chairperson of the Commission, Gro Harlem Brundtland, was appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar in December 1983. At the time, the UN General Assembly realized that there was a heavy deterioration of the human environment and natural resources. To rally countries to work and pursue sustainable development together, the UN decided to establish the Brundtland Commission. Gro Harlem Brundtland was the former Prime Minister of Norway and was chosen due to her strong background in the sciences and public health. The Brundtland Commission officially dissolved in December 1987 after releasing Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report, in October 1987. The document popularized (and defined) the term 'Sustainable Development'. Our Common Future won the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in 1991. The organization Center for Our Common Future was started in April 1988 to take the place of the Commission. Formerly known as the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), the mission of the Brundtland Commission is to unite countries to pursue sustainable development together. The Chairperson of the Commission, Gro Harlem Brundtland, was appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar in December 1983. At the time, the UN General Assembly realized that there was a heavy deterioration of the human environment and natural resources. To rally countries to work and pursue sustainable development together, the UN decided to establish the Brundtland Commission. Gro Harlem Brundtland was the former Prime Minister of Norway and was chosen due to her strong background in the sciences and public health. The Brundtland Commission officially dissolved in December 1987 after releasing Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report, in October 1987. The document popularized (and defined) the term 'Sustainable Development'. Our Common Future won the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in 1991. The organization Center for Our Common Future was started in April 1988 to take the place of the Commission. Ten years after the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, a number of global environmental challenges had clearly not been adequately addressed. In several ways, these challenges had grown. Particularly, the underlying problem of how to reduce poverty in low-income countries through more productive and industrialized economy without, in the process, exacerbating the global and local environmental burdens, remained unresolved. Neither high-income countries in the North nor low-income countries in the South were willing to give up an economic development based on growth, but environmental threats, ranging from pollution, acid rain, deforestation and desertification, the destruction of the ozone layer, to early signs of climate change, were impossible to overlook and increasingly unacceptable. There was a tangible need for a developmental concept that would allow reconciling economic development with environmental protection. Views differed on several questions: were local environmental problems the result of local developments or of a global economic system that forced particularly low-income countries to destroy their environmental basis? Did environmental burdens result mainly from destructive economic growth-based development or from a lack of economic development and modernization? Would reconciling the economy and the environment require mainly technical means by using more resource-efficient technologies or mainly social and structural changes that would include political decision-making as well as changes in private consumption patterns?The 1980 World Conservation Strategy of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, was the first report that included a very brief chapter on a concept called 'sustainable development'. It focused on global structural changes and was not widely read. The UN initiated an independent commission, which was asked to provide an analysis of existing problems and ideas for their solution, similar to earlier commissions such as the Independent Commission on International Development Issues (Brandt Commission) and the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues (Palme Commission). In December 1983, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, asked the former Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, to create an organization independent of the UN to focus on environmental and developmental problems and solutions after an affirmation by the General Assembly resolution in the fall of 1983. This new organization was the Brundtland Commission, or more formally, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). The Brundtland Commission was first headed by Gro Harlem Brundtland as Chairman and Mansour Khalid as Vice-Chairman. The organization aimed to create a united international community with shared sustainability goals by identifying sustainability problems worldwide, raising awareness about them, and suggesting the implementation of solutions. In 1987, the Brundtland Commission published the first volume of “Our Common Future,” the organization’s main report. “Our Common Future” strongly influenced the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992 and the third UN Conference on Environment and Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002. Also, it is credited with crafting the most prevalent definition of sustainability, as seen below. During the 1980s it had been revealed that the World Bank had started to experience an expanded role in intervening with the economic and social policies of the Third World. This was most notable through the events at Bretton Woods in 1945. The ideas of neoliberalism and the institutions promoting economic globalization dominated the political agenda of the world's then leading trading nations: the United States under President Ronald Reagan and the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, both classical liberals. The Brundtland Report was intended as a response to the conflict between the nascent order promoting globalized economic growth and the accelerating ecological degradation occurring on a global scale. The challenge posed in the 1980s was to harmonize prosperity with ecology. This postulated finding the means to continue economic growth without undue harm to the environment. To address the urgent needs of developing countries (Third World), the United Nations saw a need to strike a better balance of human and environmental well-being. This was to be achieved by redefining the concepts of 'economic development' as the new idea of 'sustainable development' - as it was called in the Brundtland Report.