difference between conservation and sustainable development
Answers
Broadly said, sustainable development targets management strategies in which people use a resource nowadays so that future generations can also use it later on. It encompasses the social, economical and environmental parts.
That being said, while both of them require strategy thinking, decision making and uncertainty analysis in order to be used in environmental management as decision support for land-use planning, the resource conservation has to do with the environmental part of the sustainable development.
Example of natural resource conservation: A forest that fosters an endangered species. In this case conserving Earth’s biological diversity and safeguarding its benefits would be of main interest for the resource conservation. Sustainable development has to take this into consideration (biodiversity, scarcity, pollution, life cycle), while dealing with the social (population and its need for infrastructure - a highway let say - , public good, productivity) and economical (privatization, supply and demand, policies and afferent costs) parts. What would you do? Preserve the forest and build the highway around it? - Whose land is that, what are the costs of doing so, what are the policies? And then the public opinion says that the now shifted highway is too close to the city (pollution, noise), so they protest.
The same goes for (hazardous) waste, water, fossil fuel and so much more. Look, for example a country cares about using as much renewable energy as possible (in order to avoid the depletion of natural resources), therefore the country builds many (strategically placed) wind turbines and solar panels. It's not over though. The Natural Resource Conservation is partially happy, depending on where are these equipments placed (whether they disturb or not the ecosystem). The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act has in mind the generation, transportation, treatment, storage, and disposal of waste that will arise from these wind turbines and solar panels. In this case the Sustainable Development has to find a solution between environment (conservation of resources and ecosystems, waste), economical (costs, maintaining, policies, supply and demand) and social (the public might not like the sight of wind turbines on-shore, off-shore or anywhere near their house).