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By its turn, sustainable development focuses more on a long-term vision. The views on sustainability seem to have a stronger focus on the present moment and on keeping things above a certain level. Definition of Sustainability and Sustainable Development: What’s the Difference? And that for this to be possible in the long term, the way modern societies organized shouldn’t be sustained, but rather re-designed using a regenerative perspective (more about the regenerative movement ahead). As long as an action causes little, less, or no harm to the natural world – under the belief (not always ensured) ecosystems will keep on operating and generating the conditions that allow for the quality of life of today’s modern societies not to decrease – someone is often claimed to be sustainable.ĭaniel Christian Wahl, author of Designing Regenerative Cultures, defends sustainability refers to sustaining the underlying pattern of health, resilience, and adaptability that maintain this planet in a condition where life as a whole can flourish (more about regenerative cultures at the bottom of this piece). In this way, the term “sustainability” has been broadly applied to characterize improvements in areas like natural resources overexploitation, manufacturing operations (its energy use and polluting subproducts), the linear consumption of products, the direction of investments, citizen lifestyle, consumer purchasing behaviours, technological developments or business and general institutional changes.
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Nowadays, sustainability is usually defined as the processes and actions through which humankind avoids the depletion of natural resources, in order to keep an ecological balance that doesn’t allow the quality of life of modern societies to decrease. Nonetheless, nowadays, because of the environmental and social problems societies around the world are facing, sustainability has been increasingly used in a specific way. In the end, sustainability can perhaps be seen as the process(es) by which something is kept at a certain level. What is sustainability, then? Sustainable is an adjective for something that is able to be sustained, i.e, something that is “bearable” and “capable of being continued at a certain level”. So if we start from the beginning, to means “give support to”, “to hold up”, “to bear” or to “keep up”. And sustainable is, for instance, a composition of sustain + able. In fact, there are many different viewpoints on this concept and on how it can be achieved.Įtymologically, the word sustainability comes from sustainable + ity. There is no universally agreed definition of sustainability. What is sustainability? What does it mean? What are the principles and pillars behind sustainability? What examples of sustainability are there in areas like technology, agriculture, the workplace, business, or transportation? How is sustainability connected with supply and demand? Find the answers to these and further questions right below.