A Crisis of Global Sustainability

This concise and informative text provides a critical history of the concept of sustainability and the various institutional measures taken to promote, implement and enforce sustainable development, proposing new organizational solutions to deal with the crisis of sustainability.

Crisis of Global Sustainability provides for the first time a compact insider description of the evolution and impact of the Club of Rome, a global think tank that produced a groundbreaking 1972 study "The Limits to Growth" which highlighted the dangers of unrestrained economic growth and possible collapse of global economy during the first decades of the 21st century. With recent research confirming the validity of these concerns, Kanninen asks whether our overarching concept of thinking on world development today should continue to be "global sustainability", which implies that we still have enough time to make adjustments in our future policies and action. Or should the main paradigm of our thinking shift to "global survivability", a concept that stresses the absolute necessity of immediate and drastic change both in institutions and policies?

Many environmentalists, green politicians and think tanks are speaking today more loudly than ever about the necessity for a major policy, institutional and paradigm change and this work is essential reading for students and scholars alike.

Tapio Kanninen is Senior Research Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York and a Co-Director of the Project on Sustainable Global Governance at RBIIS. A long-time UN staff member Dr. Kanninen was Chief of the Policy Planning Unit in the Department of Political Affairs (1998–2005), Head of the Secretariat of Kofi Annan’s five Summits with Regional Organizations and worked in a UNEP-funded project at the UN Statistical Office on establishing global framework for environmental statistics.