Our Common Future (Brundtland Report)
About this book
"Our Common Future," published in October 1987 by Oxford University Press on behalf of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), is the document that established the conceptual and political foundations for the global sustainable development agenda of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The report—universally known as the Brundtland Report after the Commission's chairwoman, former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland—provided what remains the most widely cited definition of sustainable development and catalysed an unprecedented convergence between environmental and development policy at the international level. The Commission was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1983 in response to growing alarm about the accelerating degradation of the natural environment and the persistence of poverty in the developing world.
Its founding premise was that environmental problems could no longer be treated in isolation from economic and social development issues: the two were inextricably linked, and any policy framework that addressed one without the other was doomed to fail. Brundtland assembled a commission of 22 members representing both the global North and South, and the report was the product of an intensive 900-day process of public hearings, expert testimony, and deliberation conducted across multiple continents. The report's central intellectual contribution is the definition of sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." This formulation, elegantly simple and deliberately broad, introduced two key concepts: the concept of needs—particularly the essential needs of the world's poorest people, which should be given overriding priority—and the concept of limits imposed by the state of technology and social organisation on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs.
The definition was designed to be inclusive enough to accommodate the legitimate development aspirations of the Global South while imposing an ethical obligation on the wealthier nations not to exhaust the planet's resource base. The report is structured in three main parts. The first examines the interconnections between global challenges: it argues that the crises of environment and development are not separate crises—an environmental crisis, a development crisis, a food crisis—but a single crisis that has been artificially fragmented by institutional and disciplinary divisions.
The second part examines specific issue areas: population and human resources, food security, species and ecosystems, energy, industry, and the urban challenge. The third part addresses international economic relations and institutional reform. On population, the report acknowledges the relationship between population growth and environmental pressure but insists that the solution is not population control per se but the empowerment of women and the provision of education, healthcare, and economic opportunity—particularly in the developing world.
On food security, it argues that the problem is not a shortage of productive capacity but a failure of access, distribution, and the equitable allocation of land and resources. On energy, the report was unusually candid about the magnitude of the challenge: it argued that the world needed to reduce the energy intensity of economic growth dramatically while expanding access to modern energy services for the billions who lacked them—a challenge it described as among the most difficult facing humanity. The energy chapter of Our Common Future is significant in the context of green building because it directly addresses the energy consumption of buildings, the role of energy efficiency in reducing environmental impact, and the need for energy systems that do not depend on the continued combustion of fossil fuels.
The report argues that the path toward sustainable energy lay through a combination of efficiency improvements, renewable energy deployment, and institutional reform—a framework that has remained central to building policy ever since. The report devotes considerable attention to the urban dimension of sustainable development. It observes that the world was in the midst of an unprecedented urban transition—hundreds of millions of people moving from rural areas to cities across the developing world—and that the quality of this transition would determine the sustainability of human civilisation for generations.
It calls for massive investment in urban infrastructure, housing, water, sanitation, and transportation, while warning against the patterns of urban sprawl and car dependence that had already proved environmentally and socially costly in the developed world. The international dimension of the report is equally important. It argues that the developed countries bear a special responsibility for global environmental problems, given that their patterns of consumption and production have historically generated the greatest share of environmental damage.
It calls for reforms to international trade, debt, and finance arrangements that would make sustainable development economically viable for poorer nations, and for the strengthening of international environmental institutions. The legacy of Our Common Future is immense. It directly led to the convening of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro—the "Earth Summit"—which produced Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
It established sustainable development as the organising principle of the United Nations development agenda and provided the conceptual framework within which the Millennium Development Goals and, subsequently, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals were formulated. Sources: Wikipedia – "Our Common Future"; Britannica; EBSCO Research Starters; UN Digital Library.