Environment and Sustainable Development, an Inquiry

Sustainable development, brought forward by the Brunt-land report in 1987, is strongly set as an important public policy concern at french as well as at global level. It has been created as an extension of the environment notion in order to reduce the pressure environment could mean on developping countries. Sustainable development associates the environment with two other dimensions it is closely related with but which are not explictly part of it, the economic and the social, introducing the key notion of intergenerational equity. Because of the wide range of aspects it covers and the numerous accesses it offers, it has opened the environmental approach to much wider views, has spread to many different fields of corporate or public activity and has raised entirely new types of actions. But, because of the diversity of elements, the extent of perspectives and spatio-temporal scales it covers, such initiatives raise the question wether they could not ultimately threaten the environment relevance. Global warming as a major environmental question is used as a reference to emphasize the need that has become more and more urgent in recent years for wide and early action, compared to sustainable development. It globally shows the fundamental range of environmental questions and the stress attached to them, mostly temporal, including at the economic level, not mentionning the specific synergies that can be associated. Such an approach allows to relativize sustainable development aims, helps to get a better grasp of its contribution to public action and to see more precisely the scope of environmental action, sine qua non condition for sustainability.