Progress in the 20^th Century

The Social Dimension:

• Average life expectancy (at birth) world wide increased by more than a third. The global average is 66 years compared with only 48 years in 1955. It is projected to reach 73 years in 2025.
• Infant mortality rate fell in developing countries by more than half
• The proportion of the population in developing countries suffering from chronic undernutrition dropped from about 40% to about 20%.
• The proportion of the population with access to safe water almost doubled, to nearly 70%
• Significant progress has been made in control of major infectious diseases, such as poliomyelitis, leprosy, guinea worm, Chagas disease and river blindness.
• Net enrollment at the primary school level increased by nearly two-third, and adult illiteracy has been reduced by nearly half.

The Economic Dimension

• In the past 50 years, poverty has fallen more than the previous 500 years.
• Since 1980, there has been a dramatic surge in economic growth in some 15 countries, with rapidly rising incomes to many of their 1.5 billion people,
• Economic policy reforms have led to substantial improvements in economic performance of many of the least developed nations.

The Environmental Dimension

The greatest environmental progress has been made in the realm of institutional developments, international cooperation, public participation, and emergence of private-sector action

• Over the last 25 years, eco-consciousness has been rising in all industrial countries and it has proved to be powerful politics.
• Legal frameworks, economic instruments, environmentally sound technologies, and cleaner production processes have been developed and applied, particularly in industrial countries.
• The levels of water and air pollution in most industrial countries have declined over the past two decades, and a number of other local environmental indicators improved as well

Owing to the availability of new and better technologies, the rate of environmental degradation in developing countries (atmospheric sulfur dioxide, for example, and soot and smoke) has been slower than that experienced by industrial countries when they were at the similar stage of economic development. The Political Dimension

Perhaps the most significant and remarkable changes over the past 30 years have occurred in the political arena:

• The number of relatively pluralistic and democratic regimes increased impressively, particularly since 1989
• Good governance became a major issue to be discussed frankly on the international development agenda
• The role of the state has been redefined from a dominating (would be) engine of development and creator of wealth to a catalytic, enabling facilitator, encouraging and complementing the activities of private business and individuals.
• Institutional development is no longer conceived as a process of strengthening only public institutions (which reinforce the dominance of the state and weakened public accountability) but also the role of the private sector and non-governmental organizations.
• Demilitarization continues: after peaking in 1984 at US$1140 billion global military expenditure dropped to 39% to US$701 billion in 1996; the number of armed conflicts came down from 50 (1992) to 24 (1997)
• Strengthening the role of women in sustainable development efforts is much more widely accepted and more systematically considered in practical situations.
• The developing world achieved gains in the past 30 years that took the industrial world a century.

An example of a private company seeking to address sustainability through the social dimension as well as the economic and environmental dimensions is the program of Weyerhaeuser (see particularly the Weyerhaeuser Roadmap for Sustainability on p.3).

PREVIOUS: Definition of Sustainable Development

NEXT: Remaining Deficits