What do you understand by sustainable development? Discuss the elements of sustainable development as proposed in the UNDP's Sustainable Development Goals Report-2015. (Answer in 350 words)

- What do you understand by sustainable development? Discuss the elements of sustainable development as proposed in the UNDP's Sustainable Development Goals Report-2015. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
Sustainable development is the attempt to make growth, equity and the natural base conditions of one another rather than trade-offs.

Body

1. What it means and what problem it answers: The Brundtland Commission's Our Common Future defined it in 1987 as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own. It answers a specific failure: growth measured as output depletes the natural base output depends on, and treats the needs of the poor and the limits of the planet as competing claims. It therefore joins three things previously handled separately — the economic, the social and the environmental — and adds obligation to generations not yet born, a limit later given physical form in the planetary boundaries work of Rockstrom and colleagues.

2. The elements the report proposes: The 2015 report accompanies the 2030 Agenda adopted at the United Nations that September, which replaced the Millennium Development Goals with seventeen goals and 169 targets under five heads. People: ending poverty and hunger in all their forms and securing health, education, water and gender equality. Planet: climate action, oceans, land, biodiversity and sustainable consumption and production, treated as conditions of development rather than as its costs. Prosperity: decent work, energy, infrastructure, industry and the reduction of inequality within and between countries, so growth is judged by its distribution. Peace: Goal 16's peaceful and inclusive societies, access to justice and accountable institutions, which brings governance inside development for the first time. Partnership: Goal 17 on finance, technology, trade and data, with the Addis Ababa Action Agenda as its financing arm. Three principles govern the whole: universality, binding rich and poor countries alike; indivisibility, no goal traded against another; and leaving no one behind, which measures progress for the worst-off group rather than the average. Review is voluntary and public, through national reports to the High-Level Political Forum against a global indicator framework.

3. How the elements hang together: They are not sectors but conditions of each other. Peace and institutions make provisioning possible, planetary limits set the envelope inside which prosperity is pursued, partnership supplies the means, and people are the point of the exercise. Pursuing any one alone defeats the rest. India tracks its states against the same architecture through the NITI Aayog's SDG India Index.

Conclusion
Its ambition is to make development a single accounting in which no gain may be entered without its cost.