Sustainable development is "development that meets the needs and aspirations of the current generation without compromising the ability to meet those of future generations." The economic activities of humankind determine that development projects impact the environment through three main pathways:

(a) spatial occupation of territory,
(b) emissions of particles and gases to the atmosphere, and
(c) discharges of liquid effluents to water.

Occupancy, emissions, and effluents may be analyzed generically, because development projects are known to result in predictable environmental effects. But the impacts of such effects depend largely on the interaction between project and local environment (ecosystem). The analysis and prediction of impacts on ecosystems must not be made as a piecemeal enterprise, where species are simply catalogued as of conservation concern or not, but must be framed within the integrative viewpoint of biodiversity and how it is related to the functioning of ecological systems. That is why we proposed the creation of a Center for Advanced Studies in Ecology & Biodiversity.

Biodiversity involves not only patterns of distribution of species in space and time, but also processes that underlie those patterns and determine whether a given habitat, biome, or ecosystem will be sustainable in the long term, faced with the impacts of anthropogenic (e.g., pollution, resource exploitation, species introductions) or natural perturbations (e.g., climatic forcings, volcanism, earthquakes). Biodiversity encompasses patterns and processes at different hierarchical levels of biological organization, from genes to populations, from species to communities and ecosystems, from local to geographical scales and from the short to the long term. All this in the face of ever increasing human activities and associated global change.