WEEK 9 : CHALLENGES TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

In this week, we have been exposed to the topic of challenges towards sustainable development from three aspects consist of social, economic, and environmental. As we all know that, to achieve successful sustainable development, those three aspects must be dependent on each other. However, there will always some challenges in achieving it, which are cross-cutting challenges, human resource challenges, financial challenges, and governance challenges. Unsuitability means unfair, inequitable, and unjust while there are many types of inequity like socioeconomic inequity, cultural inequity, societal inequity, familial inequity, and many more.

 After that, we have been exposed to social challenges for sustainable development by watching Ebit Lew’s video in helping people in need and provide them with a better life. The social component of the development is recognized as an integral feature of the new paradigm by proponents of sustainable development. Hence, the challenges are providing good living conditions, equal opportunity, maintenance of human capital, and many more. Moreover, we have been introduced to economic challenges for sustainable development. We watched a video about the circular economy and how society can re-think progress and it opens my mind about it. Hence, the key ideas for a sustainable economy are the promotion of efficiency and recycling, source materials mainly recycled materials, reduce wastes in production, packaging, and distribution, economy like an ecosystem, and dematerialization of the economy. The circular economy emphasizes components of R’s which are refuse, reform, reduce, reuse, and lastly, minimum waste can get. In IIUM, the circular economy was applied to food waste, the food consumption and production will be compost or manufacture to organic farming or compost for own consumption. 

In addition, the environmental challenges for sustainable development. We could see many environmental issues in Malaysia. In the video, we watched about villagers who want the Kedah durian plantation project scrapped because of the exploitation of water resources at Gunung Inas and its effect on the environment surrounding them. Furthermore, we watched the video about the developed countries like the US and Japan has sent their waste to our country as a dumping site. Luckily, Malaysia has taken early preventive measures by sending back the waste to their origin as they should be responsible for their issue. Other than that, there is unstainable exploitation of resources such as loss of biological diversity due to human activities such as deforestation and pollution, 40% of our global economy is dependent on biologically derived products and 17 million hectares of tropical forest destroyed each year. Next, 70- 100 species disappear every day, and water, soil, and air have been strained due to high pollution levels have clearly shown the unstainable exploitation of resources. The overexploitation of natural resources has make 1 million species on track for extinction and the decline of more than 60% of the world’s marine fishes. 

Climate change in fulfilling the wish for sustainable development has increased atmospheric temperature and extreme weather events and has risen the sea levels. Meanwhile, the food productions need to be double as the land has been degraded and nearly 2/3ed of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed areas by 2025 due to these unsustainable development issues. Hence, I would say that this is a critical issue as it involves all the country whether they are developed country or less developed county.