remediation of environmental damage. These achievements, in turn, have helped rural areas, cities, and nations around the world to improve their standards of living and support growing populations.

Many aspects of economic development and environmental protection would not be possible without technology. Water-resources management, sanitation, transportation, energy production and use, manufacturing, communication, agriculture and aquaculture, education, and health care all have a significant technological basis. Similarly, the means to manage population growth have been made possible by pharmaceutical technologies—drugs and medical devices that have helped reduce birth rates in many parts of the world.

One important aspect of global technological advance is the transfer of technology from developed to developing nations. Power generation is a good example. Plants already technically established and economical in the industrialized world offer potential for increasing energy efficiency in the emerging, densely populated areas of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. While the technology clearly exists, investment incentives are called for if these capital intensive processes are to replace less efficient ones in the developing world as well as in the developed world.

To harness technologies for environmentally sustainable development, effective national and multilateral economic policies and management strategies that have sustainability as their primary objective are needed. In every region, the most important first step is to build indigenous technological capacity, which