The biggest challenge for sustainable development in coming decades will be to operationalize it: to make it occur, or to make an effective transition toward it, in communities, places, and businesses all over the world. Very few seriously question the problems that sustainable development is intended to address-growing environmental degradation and a growing gap between rich and poor. There is also greater understanding that sustainable development is based on a set of principles that would profoundly affect national and international governance.The relationships among these principles are less well understood, though. Much of the public and academic discussion concerning sustainable development focuses on intergenerational equity' and the precautionary approach or principle 2 alone. Worse still, given the current and increasing magnitude of the world's environmental and poverty problems, relatively little progress has been made toward sustainable development in the past decade. In

Sustainable development (or sustainability) is a decision-making framework for maintaining and achieving human well-being, both in the present and into the future. The framework requires both consideration and the achievement of environmental protection, social justice and economic development. In that framework, environmental protection must be integrated into decisions about social and economic development, and social justice and economic viability must be integrated into decisions about environmental quality.As sustainable development has grown in prominence, its critics have become more numerous and more vocal. Three major lines of criticism are that the term is ‘too boring’ to command public attention, ‘too vague’ to provide guidance, and ‘too late’ to address the world’s problems. Critics suggest goals such as abundance, environmental integrity, and resilience. Beginning with the international agreements that have shaped the concept of sustainable development, this article provides a functional and historical analysis of the meaning of sustainable development. It then analyzes and responds to each of the above criticisms. It argues that the critics, understood constructively, suggest ways of strengthening this framework, but do not provide a compelling alternative. The challenge for lawyers, lawmakers, and others is to use and improve the sustainability framework to make better decisions.

Abstract:In this introduction to the special issue of Sustainability on environmental laws and sustainability, we attempt to synthesize key lessons from the issue"s ten substantive articles. These lessons involve the use of law to achieve integrated decision-making, the use of pre-existing laws to foster sustainability, the centrality of sub-national governments in achieving sustainability, the background law of unsustainable development, the growing importance of climate change, the need to use law to protect and restore ecological integrity, the importance of judicial review and nongovernmental organizations, the need to translate sustainability into specific legal principles, the challenge of creating an appropriate national legal structure for sustainability, the importance of sustainability assessment tools and institutions before and after laws are adopted, and the importance of "soft" law.

Growing international pressure to curb greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has focused attention on existing policies that may, either by design or by effect, subsidize fossil fuel production and consumption. This paper reviews existing studies of fossil fuel subsidies within the United States, as well as assessments of the potential impact of subsidy reform on GHG emissions. Evaluating the differences across the studies, it highlights the most important disparities in subsidy definition and valuation in order to clarify the conclusions that can be drawn from this body of work. We then present some of the tools used to provide transparency in environmental regulation. We conclude that many of these approaches can be used to improve the transparency of fiscal policy, with important benefits within the context of climate change and beyond. CONTENTS