Sustainability as per definition in dictionary is the ability to be sustained, supported, upheld, or confirmed. It is mostly used under environmental science, where it refers to the quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance.
Sustainability means meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In addition to natural resources, we also need social and economic resources. Sustainability is not just environmentalism. Embedded in most definitions of sustainability we also find concerns for social equity and economic development.
While the concept of sustainability is a relatively new idea, the movement as a whole has roots in social justice, conservationism, internationalism and other past movements with rich histories. By the end of the twentieth centuries, many of these ideas had come together in the call for ‘sustainable development.’
Adopting sustainable practices, whether large or small, can have significant impacts in the long run. If every office worker in the United Kingdom used one less staple a day by using a reusable paper clip, 120 tonnes of steel would be saved in one year.
Currently, the prevailing definition of sustainability emphasizes cross-generational equity, which is clearly an important concept, but which poses difficulties, since future generations’ needs are not easy to define or determine. Anchoring an alternative definition to the relationship between a population and the carrying capacity of its environment offers superior operational leverage, as it contains a number of key variables, all potentially measurable: population size, rate of resource consumption, impacts on the absorption capacity of sinks, a measure of well-being, and the like.
The Bruntdland Commission
In 1983, the United Nations tapped former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland to run the new World Commission on Environment and Development. After decades of effort to raise living standards through industrialization, many countries were still dealing with extreme poverty. It seemed that economic development at the cost of ecological health and social equity did not lead to long-lasting prosperity. It was clear that the world needed to find a way to harmonize ecology with prosperity. After four years, the “Brundtland Commission” released its final report, Our Common Future. It famously defines sustainable development as:
“development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
The Commission successfully unified environmentalism with social and economic concerns on the world’s development agenda. Sustainability is a holistic approach that considers ecological, social and economic dimensions, recognizing that all must be considered together to find lasting prosperity.
