1. Population has grown more in the last 50 years compared with the preceding 4 million years;

2. Consumption has grown faster than the regeneration capacity of the consumed renewable resource;

3. Production has raised the pollution level higher than the absorptive capacity of the ecological system.

There are of course brighter sides in this development, such as

1. Concepts and theories of sustainable development have been advanced;
2. Stakeholders on Sustainable Development have been broadened into major groupings of the private sector and civil society.

The bottom line however is the fact that, development that we pursue this far is not sustainable in economic, social and environmental sense.

Second, why is development not sustainable? Because sustainabillty of social, economic and environmental considerations are together not in the main stream of development. Mayor features of Agenda 21 are not embraced as priorities in development. What went wrong?

1. Prices fail to capture the trilogy of social, economic and environmental consideration through the market. Especially the environment is considered as free good;
2. Policy maters responsible for development fail to develop linkages between environment and development. The rejection of Kyoto Protocol for the sake of economic development is a recent example. The rejection of environmental conditlonalitles for economic development by several countries is another example. In brief, environment is separated from development;
3. While sustainable development cut across various sectors of development, such as agriculture, industry, mining, etc, the institutional arrangement of international and national organization are along sectoral line. And International Financial Institutions consider environment as an ad hoc issue rather than treating it as an integral part of development.

There are however also positive sides of development, such as:

• the development of “Green Gross Domestic Product”. The concept of extended benefit cost ratio, efforts to internalize externalities into the cost structure — are examples to cope with market failure;
• the use of ecolabels, certification of environmental standard based production, environmental and social impact analysis, green budget policy are examples to improve policies on sustainable development;
• many institutions are created by business, local government and NGO to meet the shortcomings of the existing institutional arrangement in copying with the challenge of sustainable development.

Although these steps taken are necessary and important, they are however not enough. The world is shrinking and interdependency is the driving force of development today. It forces upon us the need to reinvigorate effective implementation of sustainable development. The international community has the skill, technology and capacity to improve the sustainable development architecture.

To develop this architecture, we need to joint forces together, development and developing countries. Both countries are in the same space ship earth facing the challenge of moving along the chartered course of sustainable development. The alternative to this that we all together, developed and developing countries, in this same space ship earth will crash on environmental catastrophy disaster.

It is with this awareness that I invite all of you to joint me on this journey of spaceship earth on the chart of sustainable development that we are able to map together.

May God bless us in our common endeavor.