University of Sonora

Sustainability Postgraduate Program

Course: Introduction to Sustainable Development
Presented by: Julin Esteban Valiente Linares
Presented to: Dr. Javier Esquer Peralta
Date of delivery: Friday, May 22, 2015
RP01: Report 01
Basics for Sustainable Development
This text is proposed as a review and analysis of the relation of 4 of the most wide-spread dimensions in the
environmental issues and therefore in the Sustainable Development framework: the air, water and soil media
and the global warming. These dimensions are focus of attention because during the last 50 years have been
countless of reports and informs all around the world which say that the ecological footprint of human activity are
becoming in a serious-growing problem. The objective of this report is to show what has been that impact on the
4 dimensions, all related to the Sustainable Development.
The approach of Sustainable Development has many interpretations and meaning as we have seen in the
previous readings. Therefore is necessary to define what we are going to understand by Sustainable
Development in this assignment. I would like to propone a concept which integrate the long-term attribute that
has been understood in some definitions with the three Es definition (Edwards, 2005).
The definition would be the next: Sustainable Development as a kind of societal development in which the
society is organized following three lines, the economic growth, the environmental protection and the equity and
equality as value. The economic growth must be developed inside the environmental boundaries to avoid
overshooting them, and must ensure the welfare to all the society with equity and equality, all of this in a longterm prospective ensuring also the future material conditions. The last aspect that I would like to integrate to the
definition is the double quality of the Sustainable Development both as a method of understanding the world as a
creative and innovative way to solving related problems (Sachs, 2015).
In this report, we are using the first quality of Sustainable Development from the above written: a way of
understanding the world.
Air as contaminated media:
The pollution in the air is measured meanly by mean the concentration of CO2 on the atmosphere, although we
know that pollution it is not just related to that concentration, as explain Sachs (2015). According to this author
the CO2 concentration in the current rates is produced by the combustion of fossil fuels. This process of
combustion started during the industrial revolution principally due to the breakthrough of the steam machine and
its principal application the steam locomotive (Sachs, 2015).

The principal raw material used by then was the coal and today we still keep producing coal and obvious burning
it. Here is important to remark that by that time other breakthroughs were been spread like health improvements
and food production. Those things made that population could growth in a rates never seen. So from sustainable
development we can say that the technological breakthroughs in the Industrial Revolution led the world to grow
in population and led to grow in pollution of the air, in this case.
Let me show some data of the air pollution. The suspended material particulate usually measured by
micrograms cubic per meter of air is the most common way to measure the quality of the air we breathe
(Soubbotina, 2004). The author says that according to the UNH the healthy limits of suspended particulate
should be less than 90 micrograms per cubic meter, but by 1995 several cities around the world had a serious
quantity of SPM, i.e. the main cities in China and India which are over the 240 SPM (Soubbotina, 2004). A most
recent data from 2007 mentioned by the author and provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change shows other important measure, the CO2 concentration, measured in parts per million by volume
(p.p.m.v). This concentration has passed from 280 before the industrial revolution to 387 p.p.m.v. currently
(Rockstrm, et al., 2009). According to those author, the environmental/ecological E related to the carrying
capacity of the nature must be materialized in specific knowledge about the environmental/ecological boundaries
to guide a lifestyle that allow to keep the natural stock to other generations ensuring the current welfare needs.
In the case of the air, the boundary estimated is about 350 p.p.m.v. so we have crossed that boundary time ago.
Water as a Contaminated Media:
Those authors also can say something about the water as contaminated media. Measuring the water boundaries
in which we can develop without jeopardize the Earths carrying capacity include two boundaries following this
approach: the ocean acidification and the fresh water use. Only the first one serves to talk about a contaminated
media. According to Sachs the ocean acidification is produced by the atmospheric CO2 dissolving into the
ocean water (Sachs, 2015, p. 24). The ocean acidification is too harmful because the marine fauna in most of
the cases could not endure that changes in the pH so several species dies generating many impacts, but one is
the main: the loss of sea food very important in many cities who are feed from this source (Sachs, 2015). Other
important impact is the biodiversity loss which can generate breaks in the ecosystemic balances and therefore
impacts in other places and dimensions such as Rachel Carson taught us with Silent Spring (Edwards, 2005).
The boundary of the ocean acidification has a limit proposed on 2.75, we are in 2.90 and before the industrial
revolution it was on 3.44 (Rockstrm, et al., 2009). Worth to say that in this measurement it is taken into account
the saturation state for some marine minerals so the lower is the number the higher is the acidification.
Soil as a Contaminated Media:
The soil contamination has made principally due to the agricultural intensive activities (Rockstrm, et al., 2009).
This activity has its peak in the current rates with Green Revolution at the middle of the second half of the
century, because there chemical fertilizers started to be widely spread in the crops all around the world in order
to boost the Earth capacity at its highest levels to achieve the feed of the growing population (Sachs, 2015).

The chemical fertilizers are formed by nitrogen and phosphorous in specific compositions depending the
fertilizer.
Using the fertilizers in agriculture liberate a big amount of nitrogen and phosphorous in the soil, then is carried by
the water to the rivers, and in all the cycle the nitrogenous and phosphorous is spread (Rockstrm, et al., 2009).
The current rates of nitrogen emission are about 120 million tons per year, and the limit proposed by the author
in which the Earth can handle its estimated in 35 million tons (Rockstrm, et al., 2009).
In the case of phosphorous the limit proposed is about 11 million tons and we are in 8.5-9.5 (Rockstrm, et al.,
2009). Following those authors the boundaries of the nitrogen and phosphorous have huge rates and we are
developing without making real changes to avoid the threats that overshoot those boundaries could have.
Global Warming:
This element is strongly linked to the atmospheric pollution due to the CO2 concentration generates the knowing
greenhouse effect. The logic of the global warming is that an increase in the concentration of CO2 in the
atmosphere will increase the amount of solar energy inside the Earth because this energy could not leave the
Earth. That energy will be transformed into heat (The Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences,
n.d.).
According to the report the global temperature has increased in 0.8 c since 1900 and a half of that amount was
increased since 1970 (The Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences, n.d.). That increase on the
temperature has generated changes: in the level of sea generating a bigger probability of storm, hurricanes and
floods (The Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences, n.d.); in the geography i.e. the border in
which the moorland exist so it starts to be shorter and the ecosystemic service regarded to the fresh water
production stars to be limited; in the biodiversity changing the places which certain plant grow and modifying the
social adaptations; in the weather phenomena as droughts, downpours, snowfalls due to the increase of the
energy on the earth; in the security food because places which the agriculture is hard by the temperature it will
become harder to plant at the rates required for the achieve of the population needs.
Conclusions:
One conclusion is that the data we use to describe the environmental and social crisis must be correctly
addressed because the global data is an average that make hard the making-decision process about specific
problems on Earth. Some places are more polluted than other ones, and some places are polluted by some
pollutants and other are polluted by another pollutants. The global data is useful as an analytic and pedagogical
element, but in the making- decisions is mandatory to research the specific data.
Other conclusion is that the main cause of those contaminated media is strongly linked to the economic activity
and its unsustainable rates of growth and not just the productive phase of the economic process but the whole
process, extraction, transformation, transportation and consumption. This last one is one of the most important
phases related to the global pollution, because although we didnt discuss the dimension of the waste disposal
and chemical waste, through the research done I understand that impacts of the human activity are in several

dimensions. This pattern of economic growth is leaded by the industrial sector and nowadays the extractive raw
material activity is generating new serious social-environmental impacts. One could think that the economic
growth has those impacts by on the other hand has an equity distributions of the benefits on the society, but the
reality is that there are few people benefit with those profits, this without ignoring the global advances in health
mainly.
A change in the willingness of the making-decision people imply a change in the ethical and moral values of the
society, which the sense of solidarity and community it has lost and the individual and selfish values are the rule
of the world. An ethic approach need to replace the wish of accumulate capital and consume goods by itself with
a deep and long-term meaning, in which you think the world as a whole, including nature and other people.

References
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2. Rockstrm, J., Steffen, W. & Noone, K. e. a., 2009. A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 24 09,
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