Ambiente y desarrollo sostenible: primeros hitos a escala global con una perspectiva de historia económica

Abstract

Through this document, we seek to incorporate the economical history perspective over the first global milestones that promoted concern for the environment and sustainable development, and their underlying concepts. Today, after 50 years since the publication of “The Limits to Growth” (Meadows et al., 1972), the occurrence of the “Stockholm Conference” and the creation of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and 35 years after the publication of the Report “Our Common Future” (WCED, 1987), it is necessary and convenient to analyse these milestones, and revise the visions and concepts on which they were based, to interpret them in their historical economic context. The analysis carried out allows us to observe that the historical economic context had an important influence on the occurrence and characteristics of the milestones presented. The economic splendour observed after the Second World War during almost 30 years, seems to have privileged, albeit temporarily, the concern for economic growth and poverty reduction, compared to the environmental impact. The fact that the Report “Our Common Future” focused on sustainable development can be either seen as something natural associated to the evolution of the concept, or determined by the context of economic crises that occurred in the seventies and eighties. This second interpretation contributes to the thesis that there was a transition from a vision that opposes economic growth to environmental care, towards another where economic growth contributes to environmental care. This document seeks to provide an insight from an economical history perspective to that dialectic.