Are we better than 10 years ago?

Everyone is talking about Climate Change, recycling, Corporate Social Responsibility and so on. But sustainability as we have discussed in this blog before is the outcome if we master all these initiatives, concepts and ways of managing our organisations and society to create a sustained change in our world.

So if we would take a closer look at how our way towards a sustainable future is looking in 2007/08 what would we say? Positive, negative, confusing, disastrous or are we on the way towards sustainability in the 20th century? And how sustainable have we become over the last 10 years?

I have tried to come up with a top ten list where I think we have moved more towards and backwards on a more sustainable future in the last ten years. This top ten is not meant as ranking but solely as a listing of current hot topics.

Successes

Recycling in many countries is successful in that sense that recycling rates per person are constantly going up and the awareness is also growing
Renewable energy percentage is picking up constantly and governments encourage companies to do large future investments to make renewable energy much more efficient then the current technology
More and more international treaties on environmental protection have come into action to help protect our planet although much more is needed.
Increasing power of non governmental organisations (NGOs) has led to increased pressure on companies, governments and other interest groups to start to do the right thing in order to move closer to Sustainability
Water and sanitation has made huge progress to enable the majority of this world to have clean drinking water and sanitation possibilities.
But obviously have we made several steps backwards on some other topics.

Failures

Climate Change is getting worse and still not much progress on the Climate Change agenda has been made.
There are to many Climate Change sceptics in this world trying to convince everyone that Climate Change is not real and not the biggest threat for humanity
Due to the still increasing pollution across our globe the problem of Acid Rain has only worsened
The emergence of low-cost travelling via planes, cars and other modes of transport has only made our air pollution worse
Rain forest deforestation is still not slowing down and countries such as Brazil, etc still put company profit interests before environmental interests.
Every of these ten points is debateable of course but I think it useful to also show what successes we have had so far and not always what we are still not doing or not taking care of.

After all are we only humans and need to have some encouragement every now and then to take on the challenges life or fellow humans throw at us.

Fabian