Sustainable Development Has a Broad

¶ … sustainable development has a broad understanding and societies are more and more concerned with applying the representative features towards accomplishing people's needs so that future generations may also have the chance to do so. What sustainable development requires is that we look at the whole world as a system where everything is interrelated and dependent of one another. That is to say that a foolproof awareness of what goes around anywhere around the globe is vital for the system to function properly. However, there are a lot of missing links; one such "missing link," I might add, is related to pollution. To understand how the system works, let's consider the mere fact that people throwing waste into the sea affects an island in the ocean at 2000 km from any other coast line where no human inhabitants live, but only birds. Researchers documenting on the subject have taken a video that shows the disastrous effect on the birds who end up swallowing the waste (which can be anything from bottle corks, tooth brushes, etc.) and die. Needles to say what that causes in a chain of events.

Countries usually adopt their own system of sustainable development according to their resources; the first serious initiative for governments all over the world in this direction was in the 1990's when the focus started to be on people-centered development. To this day, conferences are being held annually to discuss the development of such processes and implementation of new ideas. Common features on which sustainable development is based on are freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature, shared responsibility, etc. The process itself aims at sustaining nature (earth, biodiversity, ecosystems), life support (ecosystem services, resources, environment), and community (peace, cultures, groups, places) for a period from at least five years to decades, hundreds or as far along in the future as possible. As can be observed, this is an ongoing process ultimately looking at the development of communities, economy and society itself. There are thus a multitude of topics one could ponder on when considering sustainable development and how it is applied in a particular case, this time, to a particular town, which is Jeddah, the second largest city in Saudi Arabia. Because of its position at sea, Jeddah has become the largest sea port on the Red Sea. it's history goes back centuries ago and has transformed the city into a large touristic attraction. It is because people have known how to use these resources that Jeddah is fastly becoming one of the most proficient evidence that sustainable development is proactive. Because people's involvement is what sustains this form of development in the first place, the Jeddah community has set agendas to inform citizens on how to reduce consumption and use green materials in construction, having also informed entrepreneurs and people generally that construction is the field where most of the energy and resources go to. What I think requires more attention is the issue of infrastructure; because of the increase in its population, Jeddah also faces problems of water resources. One of the issues that were addressed during trainings in regards to the subject was people's use of water in landscaping and that a lot of the city's resources are being drained into that direction which is not as important as water being used for other purposes that serve people's basic needs.