Stockholm Seminar
Human development and sustainability: friends or foes?
We all know that sustainability is important, and we all know for the most part what needs to be done. The question is why aren't we doing it? Listen to this Stockholm Seminar held by Pedro Conceição, Director of the Human Development Report Office, UNDP, on 21 October 2025.
The pursuit of progress in human development has often brought environmental destruction and dangerous planetary change as unintended consequences. Does this mean that the pursuit of human development is inherently a threat to sustainability? As planetary pressures increasingly endanger human wellbeing and other forms of life on Earth, is advancing human development destined to sow the seeds of its own destruction? And what kinds of concepts and metrics can help to address these questions?
In this seminar, Pedro Conceição places human development in the context of today’s global sustainability challenges, highlighting the limits of GDP as a measure of progress. The presentation reviews how the Human Development Index and related metrics have evolved to incorporate not only health, education, and income but also inequality, gender, and planetary pressures. Special attention will be given to sustainability-oriented innovations such as the Planetary Pressures–Adjusted HDI.
Emerging approaches, including hyper-local estimates of human development metrics using machine learning and frameworks for assessing humanity’s relationship with nature, underscore the possibility of aligning the pursuit of human development with the ease of planetary pressures. The discussion frames human development as a collective, ongoing effort to expand opportunities for present and future generations while addressing the urgent sustainability challenges of our time.
About the speaker
Pedro Conceição is Director of the Human Development Report Office, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) since January 2019. Prior to that he held other roles at UNDP, including Director for Strategic Policy, Chief-Economist for Africa, and Director of the Office of Development Studies. He has published on financing for development inequality, global public goods, the economics of innovation and technological change, and development in several journals and books. He is the lead author of the 2019, 2020, and 2021/22 Human Development Reports.
Prior to working at UNDP he taught at the Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal. He has degrees in physics from Instituto Superior Técnico, in economics from ISEG (Lisbon School of Economics and Management) and a Ph. D. from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied with a Fulbright scholarship.
