Sustainable Development: Exploring Connections and Contradictions
Sustainable Development: Exploring Connections and Contradictions

Summary/Abstract: In order to meet the challenges raised by a society in a permanent process of change, specific to the beginning of the 21st century, it is necessary for all its members to change their current mentality focused on immediate crises, towards a state of anticipation of the future, where the health and well-being are ensured as the end point of the sustainable development process. The theme of development is not new, but in this context, development and sustainability acquire new valences that subscribe to a strategy through which communities seek ways of development and economic growth, benefiting from the role of the environment, which fundamentally contributes to quality of life in the sense that, there where traditional methods generate congestion, expansion, pollution and excessive consumption of resources, sustainable development offers real and lasting solutions that consolidate the future. A major error of economic calculation - the neglect of the cost of degradation and damage to the environment and human health - has generated costs that must be supported by the whole society threatened with aggravating ecological hazards. The disappearance of forests and implicitly many species of plants and animals, the thinning of the ozone layer, widespread pollution, diseases and poverty are serious dangers hovering over humanity as a whole. Concerns regarding sustainable development, at the level of each country, at European and worldwide level, are the result of a complex of problems that hover over all of humanity: poverty, environmental degradation, uncontrolled expansion of urbanization, job insecurity, inflation, unemployment and other economic-financial or geopolitical crises.

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