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Achieving sustainable development will mean setting time frames for decision making.
Governments collectively and individually have a fundamentally important role in facilitating
progress towards a sustainable future. Governments need to show leadership – where they
tread society will follow.
I have no doubt that this will continue to be a long, slow, but worthwhile journey. We
need to make sure that individual projects or policies effectively integrate and balance
environmental, social, and economic factors into decision making – it needs to be done
continuously, in each place and in each year.
Clean technologies are usually more efficient thus reducing emissions and increasing
productivity. Reducing raw materials use and increasing recycling and recovery can reduce
production costs. These are opportunities for cost savings that may not become apparent even
though the benefits accrue directly to the company, until the company is motivated either by
regulation or concerns to improve sustainability performance to examine ways of addressing
these problems and to invest in the necessary research.
What is needed is a new economic model that understands that development is not
based only on economic growth, but recognizes the natural limits of our planet.
Natural resources and environmental services should come with a quantifiable, concrete
price tag in order to change perceptions and the way markets function. The goal is to close the
production loop – by using renewable energy inputs and generating no waste outputs. What
would happen if we started to charge for the air or water that companies use?