Tuesday 4 February 2014

Blog Post 6 - The Three Spheres of Sustainability

Sustainability is broadly defined as “meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. As global citizens of this world, each and every one of us have a duty to work towards a sustainable future.

We can break sustainability down into its three components: environmental, economical and social. For an action to be truly sustainable, it has to be environmentally,  economically and socially sustainable. 

Our current society and their past actions have been about promoting economic or social sustainability and growth, at the cost of the environment. However, the answer isn't simply funneling endless amounts of money into environmental protection/projects. This is simply unsustainable (although it is environmentally sustainable, it would neither be socially or economically sustainable). 


The Three Spheres of Sustainability (Adapted from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Others) 

When an action is truly sustainable, everyone benefits! The environment is protected, the economy is not harmed and the quality of life for humans increases. 

Environmental Sustainability: "in a truly sustainable environment, an ecosystem would maintain populations, biodiversity, and overall functionality over an extended period of time." Resource depletion, pollution, extinction of species, over fishing, deforestation are all examples of activites that are not environmentally sustainable (although they may be provide social or economic growth, this is overall unsustainable as you can see from the above model).
As global citizens, we must aim to not have any negative impacts on the environment and promote habitat restoration and preservation. There are many ways to contribute to environmental sustainability (coming in a post soon!).

Economic Sustainability: "involves creating economic value out of whatever project or decision you are undertaking. Economic sustainability means that decisions are made in the most equitable and fiscally sound way possible while considering the other aspects of sustainability." Actions that are economically sustainable should be made with long term benefits in mind, not just short term. Reducing unnecessary expenditure and promoting subsidies for green development, financial support for universities and education are all important to economic sustainability.   

Social Sustainability: "based on the concept that a decision or project promotes the betterment of society". Social sustainability encompasses the quality of life and consequently can deal with human rights issues, environmental law and public involvement and participation. Legislation should promote the betterment of health and well being for all of society to maintain social sustainability. 

Global citizens should strive towards achieving sustainability in all three areas. With a poor environment or poor economy it will be impossible to have a high quality of life. We must work together in achieving sustainability, it is the only hope for our planet. If we do not, then man kind will experience resource exhaustion, food shortages, dangerous levels of pollution and a decline in the world population.

The right choice is easy to see, but hard to work towards, but together we will make it.

4 comments:

  1. there is something completely missing from this model. it is the blind spot of the materialistic West, but in most every part of the world is valued as a Sphere in its own right. This Sphere is Culture. Throughout history,and even today those societies that have had the richest and most advanced cultural life have had the richest culture. Arts, Pure Science and Technology and Spirituality lie within this Sphere. A society with a decadent, diseased, distracted, dumbed down and self-destructive culture-as we are seeing in America today, are not sustainable.

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  2. there is something completely missing from this model. it is the blind spot of the materialistic West, but in most every part of the world is valued as a Sphere in its own right. This Sphere is Culture. Throughout history,and even today those societies that have had the richest and most advanced cultural life have had the richest culture. Arts, Pure Science and Technology and Spirituality lie within this Sphere. A society with a decadent, diseased, distracted, dumbed down and self-destructive culture-as we are seeing in America today, are not sustainable.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The article that you have been posted is very informative thanks for sharing with us.

    Economic sustainability

    ReplyDelete