Udo Victor E, Jansson Peter Mark
Pepco Holding Inc., Newark, DE 19714, USA.
J Environ Manage. 2009 Sep;90(12):3700-7. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2008.12.020. Epub 2009 Jun 5.
Global human progress occurs in a complex web of interactions between society, technology and the environment as driven by governance and infrastructure management capacity among nations. In our globalizing world, this complex web of interactions over the last 200 years has resulted in the chronic widening of economic and political gaps between the haves and the have-nots with consequential global cultural and ecosystem challenges. At the bottom of these challenges is the issue of resource limitations on our finite planet with increasing population. The problem is further compounded by pleasure-driven and poverty-driven ecological depletion and pollution by the haves and the have-nots respectively. These challenges are explored in this paper as global sustainable development (SD) quantitatively; in order to assess the gaps that need to be bridged. Although there has been significant rhetoric on SD with very many qualitative definitions offered, very few quantitative definitions of SD exist. The few that do exist tend to measure SD in terms of social, energy, economic and environmental dimensions. In our research, we used several human survival, development, and progress variables to create an aggregate SD parameter that describes the capacity of nations in three dimensions: social sustainability, environmental sustainability and technological sustainability. Using our proposed quantitative definition of SD and data from relatively reputable secondary sources, 132 nations were ranked and compared. Our comparisons indicate a global hierarchy of needs among nations similar to Maslow's at the individual level. As in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, nations that are struggling to survive are less concerned with environmental sustainability than advanced and stable nations. Nations such as the United States, Canada, Finland, Norway and others have higher SD capacity, and thus, are higher on their hierarchy of needs than nations such as Nigeria, Vietnam, Mexico and other developing nations. To bridge such gaps, we suggest that global public policy for local to global governance and infrastructure management may be necessary. Such global public policy requires holistic development strategies in contrast to the very simplistic north-south, developed-developing nations dichotomies.
全球人类进步发生在社会、技术与环境之间复杂的互动网络中，这种互动由各国的治理和基础设施管理能力驱动。在我们这个全球化的世界里，过去200年中这种复杂的互动网络导致了富人与穷人之间经济和政治差距的不断扩大，随之而来的是全球文化和生态系统挑战。这些挑战的根源在于我们这个有限星球上资源有限而人口不断增加的问题。富人和穷人分别出于享乐驱动和贫困驱动导致的生态消耗和污染，使问题进一步恶化。本文从定量角度探讨这些挑战，即全球可持续发展，以便评估需要弥合的差距。尽管关于可持续发展有大量的言辞表述以及众多定性定义，但可持续发展的定量定义却很少。现有的少数定量定义往往从社会、能源、经济和环境维度来衡量可持续发展。在我们的研究中，我们使用了若干人类生存、发展和进步变量来创建一个综合的可持续发展参数，该参数从社会可持续性、环境可持续性和技术可持续性三个维度描述各国的能力。利用我们提出的可持续发展定量定义和相对可靠的二手资料数据，对132个国家进行了排名和比较。我们的比较表明，各国之间存在类似于马斯洛个体需求层次理论的全球需求层次结构。正如在马斯洛需求层次理论中一样，与发达和稳定的国家相比，挣扎求存的国家对环境可持续性的关注较少。美国、加拿大、芬兰、挪威等国家具有较高的可持续发展能力，因此，在需求层次结构中比尼日利亚、越南、墨西哥等其他发展中国家处于更高位置。为了弥合这些差距，我们建议可能需要制定从地方到全球治理和基础设施管理的全球公共政策。这种全球公共政策需要整体发展战略，以取代非常简单化的南北、发达国家与发展中国家二分法。
