Introduction

Identified as one of the key concepts/ideas in the geography national curriculum, environmental interaction and  sustainable development:

• Understanding that the physical and human dimensions of the environment are interrelated and together influence environmental change.
• Exploring sustainable development and its impact on environmental interaction and climate change.

We shall be looking at a variety of topics: climate change, growing economies such as China and how they place pressure on sustainability and use of resources, global patterns of population growth and resource use within the context of globalization and consider the challenge of sustainable development at national and international scales and to a more of a local level such as neighbourhood environmental quality and the ethical turn.

Defining sustainable development

Figure 1. Sustainable development diagram

There are various definitions of sustainable development, a common definition is 'development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs' (WCED, 1987).  Figure 1 shows what we will be discussing in greater detail  in each blog but the idea of sustainable development is fraught with contradictions (Redclift, 1997) and for Sywngedouw (2007) sustainability is an idea, everybody generally agrees with it- but it is fundamentally a political question and it is difficult to put into practice and the idea is not debated in a democratic sense (post-political). We will hopefully flesh these ideas out, in the examples given earlier, in the next posts.