With the ecological crisis worsening its impacts, sustainable development has attracted much attention in recent years. However, this concept has historical roots, which are useful to be addressed and further comprehending the reasons that caused the concept to emerge and why development shall be sustainable.

Back in 1789, demography started to indicate that the human population would continually increase in numbers which would lead to the exhaustion of the Earth’s limited natural resources. In 1972, the report ‘Limits to Growth’ focused on five determining factors; population, agricultural production, natural resources, industrial production, and pollution. It was predicted that in a growing economy, all the natural resources would come to an end.

“If the present trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years.”

        – Professor Dennis Meadows in 1972 (co-author of the ‘Limits to Growth’ report)

However, the concept of ‘Sustainable development’ received its first recognition in 1972 during the UN Conference on the Human Environment (Mensah, 2019b). The concept earned recognition 15 years later, in 1987, when the World Commission on Environment and Development’s report (Brundtland Report), Our Common Future, included what is now known as the “official” definition of sustainable development:

“Development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs“.

In 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the ‘Earth Summit’, was held in Rio de Janeiro. It was highlighted that social, economic, and environmental factors are interdependent and that Sustainable Development should become a priority item on the agenda of the international community. The United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon recognized sustainable development (SD) as one of the five main goals in the UN action agenda in 2012, underlining the crucial role SD should play in global and national development policies, programmes, and agenda (Mensah, 2019b).

At the UN Sustainable Development Summit in September 2015, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which has 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at its core, was adopted.