“During the 1970’s energy efficiency became more and more of a problem and a challenge, and people developed better appliances and all that, but at the same time due to that additional efficiency and elegance, more money was available for consuming energy, more gadgets were invented and while the energy intensity of the economy went down, the energy consumption went up all the time. And this is the rebound effect. Now if we want to confront it, the best thing to do is to make energy slightly more expensive every year.”

“The fact is that we have more and more people all around the world living in urban areas, so this is where we have to focus on some work. And this is where I think it’s just a necessity. We’re going to have possibly nine billion people, we’re going to go from six to nine, in a matter of forty years. A of them are going to be living in cities, so we’d better build cities that are going to be as sustainable as we can make them.”

Christine Loh, Former Hong Kong Legislator and Founder of the Citizens Party

“The requirements of sustainable development are a change, sometimes a transformative change, in our mindsets, in our value systems, in our basic behavioral patterns. In our production systems, in our consumption patterns, and so on. Those are things people find hard to change. In the case of production systems, partly because they have invested in the old ones, which makes it costly. In the case of consumption patterns, they are so used to them that they think that is the only good way to go. It will actually require a redefinition of what is a good life.”

Ashok Khosla, Chairman of Development Alternatives New Delhi and President of IUCN

“You can compare Earth Charter to a constitution for a nation state. If you want to found a democracy, you need a constitution. It is not only a formal system of voting, it’s also your ambitions as a people, as a state. The very first step is this conviction. We are as it were reborn, reborn to understand that we all belong to one dimension, let’s say, peoples all around the world, are also related. And the second point is that we better understand that the challenges we have to face, whether it is poverty, or discrimination, or climate change, are interconnected.”

Ruud Lubbers, Economist and Former Prime Minister of the Netherlands

“One of the remarkable starting points is to recognize that world development since industrialization has occurred under the presumption that we can exploit nature and that we can predict the impacts and outcomes of that exploitation. And that we believe that nature changes in very incremental, linear and predictable ways. What we’re learning very rapidly is that that’s not correct. That in fact, our exploitation in nature has potentially very dramatic non-linear changes, that we can cross thresholds with potential very rapid, irreversible and catastrophic impacts.”

Johan Rockström, Professor in Natural Resources Management

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