Sustainability

More than thirty years ago Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Prime Minister of Norway, headed up the UN’s World Commission on Global Environmental Development.  In 1987 she presented the Commission’s report at the 96th UN plenary meeting in which she coined the often-quoted definition of sustainable development as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

From there sustainability has evolved to the point that raises the question, for application and the opportunity for cooperative efforts, of how it should be defined today.

A while back I conducted research into sustainability for an article.  I started with Brundtland’s definition of Sustainable Development, expanded to include the three elements of sustainability (environment, economics, equity) within the three key communities of Government, Business, and Education. 

As Susan Anderson, then of Portland, Oregon’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, pointed out during our interview “…everything’s connected and whatever you do today affects tomorrow.”  I am in full agreement with that and feel that in order to ensure sustainability succeeds we need to promote sustainable innovations that reduce our demands on resources while improving economic performance and meeting social responsibilities.  

My research revealed the importance of incentivizing environmental and economic development by promoting policies that moved sustainability forward.  It also showed that workforces, now and in the future, need to be educated to employ innovation and establish meaningful business strategies that deliver a Return on Investment and for the sustainable programs in all three communities.  Finally, business needs to ensure sustainability is an ongoing process, not a managed one that fades when pressures subside.

In closing that article, I presented this contemporary definition of sustainability:

“Sustainable development is that development which when guided by conceptual and functional truths, incentivized by effective design and policy, and imbedded into long-term strategies allows mankind to globally meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

Though a bit wordy, it covers more ground than Brundtland and helps to focus on the common threads that will unify these communities globally.

As devotees of sustainability we need to drive public and corporate policies to create a level playing field by putting incentives in place that promote innovative behavior, instead of policies that repress bad behavior.  Governments are almost always short term and nationalistic, yet the problems we face are long-term and global.  Sustainability reaches across boarders to solve global problems and meet the needs of generations far into the future.