Sustainability and Consumerism

The Brundtland Commission report Our Common Future in 1987 gave birth to the concept of sustainable development. The meaning is benefitting the present without compromising the future. It was felt that, unless conventional growth and development are replaced by sustainable development through environmentally friendly actions, doomsday is very near. However, such sustainable development was followed by a global spree of consumerism that only added to the environmental burden. This dichotomy needs to be understood, and for the same purpose, one needs to go back to that point of Earth's history when ecology and economy were synonymous. From then on, the drift between the ecology and economy that has brought us to today's scenario needs to be understood. In this background, the chapter raises questions on how green the green sectors are. Furthermore, can sustainable development and consumerism be captured as one body of ‘sustainable consumerism'?

President's Page: Advancing sustainability in SEG

In 1987, the United Nations Brundtland Commission defined sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” In this framework, development is conceived as an integrated approach to elevate the quality of life by raising economic progress with environmental protection considerations. This vision evolved into the formulation in 2015 of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to mitigate the hazards of climate change and to contribute to the development of society in every aspect, establishing targets to be attained by 2030. As an example, SDG 13: Climate Action calls for initiatives to moderate climate change within development frameworks. SDG 14: Life Below Water and SDG 15: Life on Land also call for more sustainable practices in using the earth's natural resources. The world is not making progress against the SDGs fast enough to achieve all the goals within the established timeline, yet with international agreements and specific actions, the success rate is growing incrementally.

A REVIEW OF SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT TOOLS ON PRIORITIZING PHYSICAL SAFETY AND COMFORT TO EFFECTIVELY CONTROL ACCIDENTS IN STREETS OF COLOMBO

The definition of sustainability has evolved since it was defined by the Brundtland commission in 1987, and become comprehensive over time with defined social, environmental and economy based ‘Sustainable Development Goals’. Today the necessity and feasibility of inclusion of safety and comfort as key components of sustainable development of urban streets has become vital considering the number of accidents and crimes taking place in urban contexts. High number of road accidents have been recorded in Colombo as noted from the report issued by the Sri Lanka Department of Census and Statistics. This is primarily due to lack of regulations or any ratification on enforcing physical safety and comfort aspects. Therefore considering the principles of sustainability, and sustainability rating being established an universal quality assessment tool, it is important to incorporate physical safety and comfort as an element of sustainability in designing urban streets. The analysis is done by defining sustainability through literature review, identifying the research gap on physical safety and comfort using VOSviewer software, and assessing the significance of safety and comfort in designing urban streets using available online data.

Do we Understand Sustainability? An Architectural Insight Into the Origin of the Concept

Sustainability is a concept shrouded in abstraction. While we have definitions in existence, it is often difficult to explain the concept itself. The current definition of ‘sustainable development’ was given by the Brundtland Commission’s report in 1987. The Earth Summit at Rio in 1992 gave us Agenda 21, an action plan to achieve sustainable development. Now in the 21st century, philosophers, academicians, and researchers across the globe are paving the way for a new understanding of the term ‘sustainability’, its contextual nature, and its relation to humans, politics, and ecology. This article investigates the origins of the term ‘sustainability’, its derivatives, and the concept of sustainable development. A semantical analysis is carried out to understand the differences between ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’. Next, the development of the three pillars of sustainability and the application of these concepts in the field of architecture and design is also investigated.

Social Innovation for a Just Sustainable Development: Integrating the Wellbeing of Future People

Social innovation has gained increased attention as a mechanism for sustainable development. As the Brundtland Commission highlights, the improvement of present conditions should not compromise future generations’ needs. So far, (social) sustainable development has mostly focused on the amelioration of contemporary people’s wellbeing, relegating its duties towards future generations to second place. Given this, I consider it necessary to (re-)direct social innovation towards the promotion of the wellbeing of future people. I propose the concept of irreplaceable goods, a notion deriving from a strong sustainability perspective, which could then be integrated into social innovation practices related to sustainable development. Focusing on guaranteeing, at least, sufficient fruition of certain goods and resources, I devise this concept as a governance tool for steering development actions towards intergenerational justice, driven by social innovation action. In this article, we firstly delineate the relations between sustainable development and social innovation, while focusing on ‘value-driven’ social innovation. Afterward, I shortly introduce strong sustainability as support for future generations’ wellbeing. Furthermore, I develop the concept of irreplaceable goods as a governance tool in social innovation practices and finalize with a discussion on the application of irreplaceable goods in the assessment of sustainable development strategies.

Africa’s Current Path

Cilliers provides a summary and analysis of Africa’s development history since the 1980s including the impact of the Brundtland Commission report that culminated in the Millennium Development Goals and, in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals. Other key matters covered in the chapter are the impact of the various structural adjustment programmes, Africa’s growing dependence upon commodities, the continents rapid democratisation and slow pace of urbanisation. The chapter concludes with a summary of key characteristics of Africa’s likely future—the Current Path forecast to 2040—that includes a forecast of economic size, demographics, income and poverty levels. The chapter serves as essential backdrop to the struggle for development that is examined across different sectors in subsequent chapters.

Trajnostni razvoj in njegova nadgradnja glede na probleme sodobne družbe v prostoru

Sustainable development, or discourse, is currently still the dominant environmental discourse in international and local environments, which was formed on the initiative of the so-called Brundtland Commission in the mid-1980s due to many social problems, especially environmental problems and their consequences. It basically represented the first global response from a critical, wider public, due to the growing needs of an ever-growing population, spatial pressures and lack of environmental awareness, reflected in increasing consequences for living and non-living nature and especially for humans. The idea of sustainable discourse represented the beginning of a positive direction in solving environmental problems, but in practice the environmental paradigm is still insufficiently established and globally effectively accepted, the operation of which often develops only on a theoretical level. Due to the lack and unification of concepts, but above all practical, efficient and feasible concepts in space, it is necessary to upgrade sustainable discourse, which will take into account modern trends and current spatial and natural conditions and limitations.

Translation in Social and Environmental Sustainability: Case of Energy Sector in few Asian Countries

In 1987, the Brundtland Commission introduced the term “sustainable development” to highlight the needs for taking the future generations into account. The term has evolved from only focusing on the human kind to reconciliation between humans and nature. On one hand, this evolution opens space for nature and vulnerable people to be acknowledged, on the other hand, it raises difficulties in implementing the idea due to its heterogeneity. By the mid 1990s, for instance, there were more than 100 definitions of sustainability (Marshall and Toffel, 2005). Rather than following previous scholars trying to find a general definition for sustainability, we try to approach it through the idea of translation. From this perspective, diversity is being bounded via others’ right such as a practice is wrong whenever it might harm others and not because it looks different. Based on the argument above, we look at the energy sector within Asian countries in an attempt to increase variety in understanding sustainability.

On Intergenerational Commitment, Weak Sustainability, and Safety

This article examines sustainability from a policy perspective rooted in environmental economics and environmental ethics. Endorsing the Brundtland Commission stance that each generation should have undiminished opportunity to meet its own needs, I emphasize the foundational status of the intergenerational commitment. The standard concepts of weak and strong sustainability, WS and SS, are sketched and critiqued simply and intuitively, along with the more recent concept of WS-plus. A recently proposed model of a society dependent on a renewable but vulnerable resource (Barfuss et al. 2018) is introduced as an expositional tool, as its authors intended, and used as a platform for thought experiments exploring the role of risk management tools in reducing the need for safety. Key conclusions include: (i) Safety, in this case, the elimination of risk in uncertain production systems, comes at an opportunity cost that is often non-trivial. (ii) Welfare shocks can be cushioned by savings and diversification, which are enhanced by scale. Scale increases with geographic area, diversity of production, organizational complexity, and openness to trade and human migration. (iii) Increasing scale enables enhancement of sustainable welfare via local and regional specialization, and the need for safety and its attendant opportunity costs is reduced. (iv) When generational welfare is stochastic, the intergenerational commitment should not be abandoned but may need to be adapted to uncertainty, e.g., by expecting less from hard-luck generations and correspondingly more from more fortunate ones. (v) Intergenerational commitments must be resolved in the context of intragenerational obligations to each other in the here and now, and compensation of those asked to make sacrifices for sustainability has both ethical and pragmatic virtue. (vi) Finally, the normative domains of sustainability and safety can be distinguished—sustainability always, but safety only when facing daunting threats.