Up to the 1960s, environmental issues were relegated to a back seat. At best, they were the object of sector policies which set up systems to fight pollution that were limited in time and space.
In the early 1970s people began to become aware of these issues, mainly thanks to media coverage of the great ecological disasters caused by economic activity. In the context of this worry on the part of societies in the North with regard to the negative aspects of industrialisation, the environment started to be seen from a multidimensional angle (economic, social, ecological…), and this approach gave rise to the creation of new institutions, both on a national level (Ministry of the Environment…) and on an international level (adoption of 26 principles and a plan of action at the first World Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972). But the credibility of the notion of “sustainable development” still remained politically weak.
It was only from the 1980s onwards that the concept of sustainable development truly emerged and acquired a certain institutional recognition. The accumulation of large-scale accidents such as the disasters at Seveso in 1976, Bhopal in 1984, Chernobyl in 1986, and the realisation of the risk that natural resources would be exhausted, made people more aware internationally of the irreversible risks that threatened the planet and jeopardised the future of the generations to come.
At the Rio Conference in 1992 the concept of sustainable development was defined more precisely…