Sustainable development: Our Common Future revisited

No clear definition of sustainable development exists to guide politicians in solving challenges at the global or regional levels. Rather, the concept's use has increasingly reflected socially desirable attributes of solutions to local- and project-level problems, but these ignore the global challenges that the concept was meant to address. We return to the original definition of sustainable development used in the Brundtland Report and suggest an assessment method to determine whether countries currently meet the threshold values of four equally important primary dimensions: safeguarding long-term ecological sustainability, satisfying basic needs, and promoting intragenerational and intergenerational equity.…