Sustainable development : Concepts, rationalities and strategies

All human activity brings about environmental changes, but the expansion of industrial economic activity has brought the scale of actual and potential harmful impacts to unprecedented levels and intensity. Three broad dimensions of environmental damage may be identified. The first is the threat posed to human life, health and continuing economic activity impairments to the functional, productive and assimilative capacities of ecological systems. The second is the threat to the natural world — the loss of biodiversity, the disappearance of particular habitats and the extinction, local and global, of particular species of flora and fauna. The third is the threat to socially, aesthetically and culturally significant environments, both rural and urban.