Abstract
In Our Common Future, the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1990, 87, 105), both phrases of sustainable development and environmental security marked their entry into the international debates and were highlighted as important notions of the future global ecological governance. This could suggest that those two concepts are closely linked and perhaps even similar. Yet, sustainable development and ecological security are quite different, although each concept has many various definitions.
Sustainable development is a response to the 1970s concept of limits to growth in the environmental debates and appears for the very first time in the 1980 World Conservation Strategy, prepared by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (Ferguson 2011; Langhelle 2000). Nonetheless, it was first precisely defined by the WCED (1990, 87) as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".
