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Ecological debt and sustainable development Gábor Szabó and Szabolcs Diósi The ecological debt, climate change, and sustainable development are key challenges that our planet is facing today. Ihe global community has been making considerable efforts to address them, including through the Stockholm Declaration, the Brundtland Report, and successive global summits and agreements, over the past decades. Nevertheless, humanity is still not on the right track to achieve its sustainable development-related objectives. The European Union has an outstanding record in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN’s 2030 Agenda programme. However, this performance is still falling short of the set objectives and remains unevenly distributed among the Member States. Keywords: 2030 Agenda (Sustainable Development Goals), circular economy, ecological debt, European Green Deal, sustainable development INTRODUCTION The term sustainable development gained international recognition for the first time in 1987 when the World Commission on Environment and Development published its historical Brundtland Report Our Common Future. According to the classical definition given by this Commission, the notion refers to a “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (United Nations 1987, 43). Ina more general sense, sustainable development entails a social-economic model that prioritises environmental protection and considers the long-term consequences of the planet’s economic activity. It stresses the importance of creating a better quality of life for everyone on earth, not just in the present days but also for future generations to come. It focuses on shaping the economy in a way that makes sure that people living on our planet “don’t consume more resources than the planet has to offer, and the benefits of economic growth are allocated fairly among all members of the world population” (European Commission 2019b, 3).
