Accelerating Sustainable Development

By this time, most readers may have noticed the expanded focus and new design of Environment as we become a magazine of science and policy for sustainable development. What may be less clear is how the world is coping with its attainment. Two sets of widely recognized sustainable development goals—in the short term (2015), those of the United Nations Millennium Declaration, and in the long term (2050), those of the sustainability transition of the world’s Academies of Science—appear to be doable in theory but under current practice are well out of reach. To mark the millennium, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a set of 60 short-term goals that fall under seven overarching categories, including development, hunger, and poverty; the environment; and Africa’s specific needs. Many of these goals have specific targets, such as cutting hunger in half or insuring universal primary school education by 2015. Progress has been made in cutting poverty but less so in hunger—and in Africa, poverty and hunger keep rising. When the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Board on Sustainable Development first reviewed the complexity of the sustainable development literature, it concluded, “The primary goals of a transition toward sustainability over the next two generations should be to meet the needs of a much larger stabi