Human development and sustainability: friends or foes?

The pursuit of progress in human development has often brought environmental destruction and dangerous planetary change as unintended consequences. Does this mean that the pursuit of human development is inherently a threat to sustainability? As planetary pressures increasingly endanger human wellbeing and other forms of life on Earth, is advancing human development destined to sow the seeds of its own destruction? And what kinds of concepts and metrics can help to address these questions?

In this seminar, Pedro Conceição will place human development in the context of today’s global sustainability challenges, highlighting the limits of GDP as a measure of progress. The presentation will review how the Human Development Index and related metrics have evolved to incorporate not only health, education, and income but also inequality, gender, and planetary pressures. Special attention will be given to sustainability-oriented innovations such as the Planetary Pressures–Adjusted HDI.

Emerging approaches, including hyper-local estimates of human development metrics using machine learning and frameworks for assessing humanity’s relationship with nature, underscore the possibility of aligning the pursuit of human development with the ease of planetary pressures. The discussion will frame human development as a collective, ongoing effort to expand opportunities for present and future generations while addressing the urgent sustainability challenges of our time.

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About the speaker

Pedro Conceição is Director of the Human Development Report Office, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) since January 2019. Prior to that he held other roles at UNDP, including Director for Strategic Policy, Chief-Economist for Africa, and Director of the Office of Development Studies. He has published on financing for development inequality, global public goods, the economics of innovation and technological change, and development in several journals and books. He is the lead author of the 2019, 2020, and 2021/22 Human Development Reports.

Prior to working at UNDP he taught at the Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal. He has degrees in physics from Instituto Superior Técnico, in economics from ISEG (Lisbon School of Economics and Management) and a Ph. D. from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied with a Fulbright scholarship.

About the Stockholm Seminars

The lectures are open to the public and free of charge.

For more information visit stockholmresilience.org

The Stockholm Seminars are organised by the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the Anthropocene Laboratory at the Royal Academy of Sciences, the Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere Programme at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Albaeco, Future Earth and Stockholm Resilience Centre.