Sustainability assessment: From brundtland report to sustainable development goals

The increase in population, the urbanization processes and the heavy anthropic interventions are bringing new and differentiated stresses for environmental and urban systems, including socio-economic pressures and natural disasters. The problems that societies have to address nowadays are numerous, ranging from environmental pollution to soil consumption, from the lack of water and food to the necessity of biodiversity protection and climate change reduction. Immediate and efficient solutions are needed in order to avoid the achievement of an irreversible condition. In this context, the concept of sustainability has been pro-posed since many years as an innovative paradigm of intervention, with the objective of limiting these problems and to mitigate their effect in the long period. The paper aims at briefly illustrating the concept of sustainable development, focusing on its evolution over the years, from the Brundtland Report to Sustainable Development Goals that have been recently proposed by the United Nations. Particular attention will be devoted to the analysis of the relationship between sustainability and urban and territorial planning, trying to identify the main existing approaches for the introduction of sustainability as the fundamental paradigm for future development