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Human Development Report 2011
United Nations Development Programme
November 02, 2011

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Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All

Overview

This year's Report focuses on the challenge of sustainable and equitable progress. A joint lens shows how environmental degradation intensifies inequality through adverse impacts on already disadvantaged people and how inequalities in human development amplify environmental degradation.

Human development, which is about expanding people's choices, builds on shared natural resources. Promoting human development requires addressing sustainability-locally, nationally and globally-and this can and should be done in ways that are equitable and empowering.

We seek to ensure that poor people's aspirations for better lives are fully taken into account in moving towards greater environmental sustainability. And we point to pathways that enable people, communities, countries and the international community to promote sustainability and equity so that they are mutually reinforcing.

Why sustainability and equity?

The human development approach has enduring relevance in making sense of our world and addressing challenges now and in the future. Last year's 20th anniversary Human Development Report (HDR) celebrated the concept of human development, emphasizing how equity, empowerment and sustainability expand people's choices. At the same time it highlighted inherent challenges, showing that these key aspects of human development do not always come together.

The case for considering sustainability and equity together

This year we explore the intersections between environmental sustainability and equity, which are fundamentally similar in their concern for distributive justice. We value sustainability because future generations should have at least the same possibilities as people today. Similarly, all inequitable processes are unjust: people's chances at better lives should not be constrained by factors outside their control. Inequalities are especially unjust when particular groups, whether because of gender, race or birthplace, are systematically disadvantaged.

More than a decade ago Sudhir Anand and Amartya Sen made the case for jointly considering sustainability and equity. "It would be a gross violation of the universalist principle," they argued, "if we were to be obsessed about intergenerational equity without at the same time seizing the problem of intragenerational equity" (emphasis in original). Similar themes emerged from the Brundtland Commission's 1987 report and a series of international declarations from Stockholm in 1972 through Johannesburg in 2002. Yet today many debates about sustainability neglect equality, treating it as a separate and unrelated concern. This perspective is incomplete and counterproductive.

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