Introduction

The Brundtland Report, published in 1987 (Brundtland, 1987) – also called Our Common Future – by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) introduced the concept of sustainable development: ‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Since then, there has been enormous progress made in our understanding of the concept of sustainability and how success can and should be measured, thanks to scientific discovery, technological advancement and, to a large degree, more and more climate-related natural disasters worldwide that have propelled increasing urgency.