Implementing space technology into sustainable development and resilience theory

Sustainable development is a relatively recent concept that started to be used in the early 1980s. In 1983, the United Nations General Assembly created the World Commission on the Environment and Development. As a result, the Commission recognized that “many critical survival issues are related to uneven development, poverty and population growth. They all place unprecedented pressures on the planet’s land, waters, forest and other natural resources, not least in developing countries”. The report focused on the importance of the principle of intergenerational equitynamely, that we must take into account the uncomfortable notion that unborn generations may pay for our environmental excesses for lifetimes to come. It also outlined common but differentiated responsibilities that succinctly defined sustainable development as “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Today the concept of sustainable development and its corollaries have been incorporated into hundreds of international economic, environment, and development-related treaties and instruments: even so, many would acknowledge that the concept has just barely started making inroads into our political and economic culture. Two more recent initiatives may help illustrate how sustainable development is envisioned today, at the highest multilateral level. The most recent major global conference on the topic – Rio+20, which took place in June of 2012, – concluded that sustainable Implementing space technology into sustainable development and resilience theory