This is a chapter from T. Trzyna, ed. A Sustainable World: Defining and Measuring Sustainable Development. Sacramento and London: California Institute of Public Affairs and Earthscan for IUCN, 1995. For detailed information about the book, click here. This chapter copyright © 1995, IUCN.

Other online chapters and excerpts from A Sustainable World:

– Introduction to A Sustainable World (Excerpt)

– Knowledge for Sustainable Development: What Do We Need to Know? Stephen Viederman

Sustainability:

Rhetoric or Reality?

DAVID A. MUNRO

At the time he wrote this chapter, Dave Munro was a consultant based in British Columbia, Canada. A former Director General of IUCN, he had also held senior positions in the Government of Canada and the United Nations. He guided preparation of the World Conservation Strategy and directed the  Caring for the Earth project. Dr. Munro passed on in October 2004.

Sustainability is now widely regarded as an essential characteristic of most human activities. The concept is derived from that of sustainable development, first given currency by the World Conservation Strategy (IUCN 1980). Since the publication of the Brundtland Report (World Commisson on Environment and Development 1987), both terms have become buzzwords for everyone concerned with environment and development. And since 1987, further stimulated by the publication of Caring for the Earth (IUCN/UNEP/WWF 1991) and the adoption of Agenda 21 at the Earth Summit in 1992, awareness of the need to balance environmental and developmental concerns has increased dramatically. The terms sustainable development and sustainability have been used to characterize almost any path to the kind of just, comfortable, and secure future to which everyone aspires. But like other suddenly fashionable words and phrases, these have been misunderstood and misused with increasing frequency. Even worse, they have been used to misinform so as to gain advantage for narrow and special interests. One may well ask, do they still have any meaning beyond rhetoric?

I believe they continue to stand for a valid and vital concept. But what it means in operational terms—how it may be applied—is by no means clear. Accepting the importance of sustainability as a guiding principle for the attitudes and practices that must prevail in future, this workshop has a vital role to play in clarifying the meaning and underlining the reality of the concept.

If the workshop is to meet the objectives outlined by the Chair, it should start from a common understanding of what the terms mean. While we could easily spend all our time debating them, I would suggest that we give highest priority to discussing operational issues— practical applications of the concept. With that in mind I offer the following definitions and observations as a basis for the discussions to follow.

Development is any and all kinds of activities or processes that increase the capacity of people or the environment to meet human needs or improve the quality of human life. The product of development is people who are healthy, well-nourished, clothed, and housed; engaged in productive work for which they are well-trained; and able to enjoy the leisure and recreation we all need. Thus development includes not only the extraction and processing of resources, the establishment of infrastructure, and the buying and selling of products, but also and of equal importance activities such as health care, social security, education, nature conservation, and supporting the arts, among other things. Development is a complex of activities, some with social, some with economic objectives, some based on material resources, some on intellectual resources, all enabling people to reach their full potential and enjoy a good life.

For development to be sustainable, it must continue, or its benefits must be maintained, indefinitely. This means that there must be nothing inherent in the process or activity concerned, or in the circumstances in which it takes place, that would limit the time it can endure. It also means that it must be worthwhile; it must meet the social and economic objectives just noted. To characterize an activity as sustainable, or to refer to sustainability, is to predict the future—an activity that is risky at best. It follows, then, that sustainability is inevitably an uncertain characteristic and that the best we can do in seeking to achieve it is to chose activities that careful analysis tells us are likely to be sustainable. There are many grounds for such choices as well as for rejecting activities that are clearly unsustainable. To summarize then, sustainable development is the complex of activities that can be expected to improve the human condition in such a manner that the improvement can be maintained.

At this rather simplistic level, the concept is easy enough to understand and it would seem to have widespread and powerful support. But applying the concept makes things more complex. Caring for the Earth begins to reflect this when it offers a more precise definition of sustainable development—namely, "improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems." It thus clearly defines an environmental or ecological constraint on development that must be respected if it is to be sustainable. To apply the Caring for the Earth definition, we need to know what supporting ecosystems are and what carrying capacity is.

Ecological sustainability

Supporting ecosystems are the sole sources of the necessities of life, including air, fresh water, food, and the materials necessary for clothing, housing, cooking, and heating. In addition and equally important, it is only within ecosystems that vital life-supporting processes can take place: these include the regeneration of soil, pollination of plants, and the global circulation of carbon, oxygen, and other elements necessary for life.

To delimit supporting ecosystems for nations or communities is not a simple matter. The people of the Kalahari and a very few others who "lack development" may find all that they need within their immediate surroundings. This was once the case for all human communities, but now practically all the world’s peoples depend upon ecosystems that are extended to greater or lesser degree, often virtually to the global level, by trade and technology. For example, the shops of high-income countries are filled with fresh, dried, and frozen produce of land and sea from all over the world. Phenomena that disrupt ecological processes have similarly extended effects—in the case of the destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer, to the limits of the globe itself. Other examples are acid precipitation, which kills trees thousands of kilometers from its points of origin, and pollution by heavy metals, which reduces the productivity of downstream waters thousands of kilometers from its sources. Despite the widespread occurrence of ecological impacts, it is nevertheless possible and instructive to define the origins and destinations of a community’s imports and exports, including not only goods and services in trade, but also ecological benefits and damages. On the basis of such an analysis, the limits of its supporting ecosystem could be drawn. If this were to be done for the most highly industrialized nations, it would be evident that the supporting ecosystem is the world itself.

Having defined the limits of a supporting ecosystem, the next step is to define its carrying capacity for people. The notion of carrying capacity probably originated with the pastoral tribes of prehistoric times when they noted that their herds could not long subsist on just one grassy hillside; they had to move onto another one once the forage on the first had been lightly cropped, lest overgrazing should reduce its capacity to recover. It was no doubt also obvious to the pastoralists that the carrying capacity of a particular hillside depended on the characteristics of the forage species, the quantity and temporal distribution of rainfall, and the qualities of the soil and the slope of the land, among other factors. Furthermore, they must have noticed that the impact upon carrying capacity or, to put it another way, the stress on the land, was a product of the numbers and species of animals and the amount of forage that they consumed. In recent times, carrying capacities of habitats have been calculated for deer, elk, and other game species on the basis of quite precise measurement of all the factors involved, and these calculations take account of not just one, but a desired mix of species. Caring for the Earth attributes a new and broader meaning to carrying capacity in considering it to be the capacity of an ecosystem to support healthy organisms while maintaining its productivity, adaptability, and capability for renewal. This expanded meaning is important because it reflects the significance of ecological processes and the notion that carrying capacity for any species, including humans, must be determined within the context of the health and productivity of other species.

There has been much speculation about the carrying capacity for humans of regions, nations, and the earth itself. Some observers, noting widespread environmental deterioration, loss of species, and seemingly irreversible depletion of resource stocks, claim that global carrying capacity for people has already been exceeded. They are correct if we start from the premise that the costs of environmental deterioration, species loss, etc., outweigh the economic and social benefits that flowed from the activities that caused those losses. The vast majority of the people act as if there were no immutable limits to carrying capacity. Some of this majority justify their behavior on the basis that new technology and resource substitution offer infinite possibilities for cleaning up the environment and providing raw materials and that carrying capacity is, therefore, practically infinite.

Social sustainability

Let us begin by asking if there are social constraints on development analogous to the ecological limits set by carrying capacity. Social sustainability reflects the relationship between development and current social norms. An activity is socially sustainable if it conforms with social norms or does not stretch them beyond the community’s tolerance for change. Social norms are based on religion, tradition, and custom; they may or may not be codified in law. They have to do with ethics, value systems, language, education, family, and other interpersonal relations (including between sex and age groups), hierarchies and class systems, work attitudes, tolerance, and all other aspects of individual or group behavior that are not primarily motivated by economic considerations. Most of these norms are difficult to define and measure, and social limits are therefore hard to determine and evaluate. It is also significant that we live in a world of fast-moving social and economic change: behavior that was unacceptable yesterday may now be or soon become fully acceptable. Social norms may persist in the short term, but most will almost certainly change in the longer term.

That social norms are not immutable, particularly in countries where change is a pervasive characteristic of society, is also shown by the changing roles and status of women in many industrialized societies; that they are not easily altered is testified by the slow pace and the limited extent of those same changes. Some very persistent social norms relate to property, or, to use a less limiting term, heritage. Among many traditional societies, high values are attached to the natural environment as a whole or to its major components, such as the land itself, water, fish, or game. In many communities some or all of these resources are considered as common property and, while traditional users’ rights may be recognized, the resource itself is considered inalienable.

Economic sustainability

Are there economic constraints on development analogous to the ecological and social constraints just discussed? Clearly there are. Economic sustainability depends upon the relationship between benefits and costs; more precisely, it requires that benefits exceed or balance costs. It is more easily measurable than social sustainability because it can be defined in numerical terms, primarily units of currency. But it is at least as difficult to predict since it is affected by so many variables.

Economic sustainability is conditioned mainly by the availability and cost of inputs, the cost of extraction and/or processing, and the demand for the product. All these factors are highly variable over time and among the world’s regions. For those whose approach to sustainability is driven by a concern for the natural environment, key constraints on economic processes are the need to use resources in ways that do not damage the environment nor impair the capacity of renewable resources to continually replenish their stocks. The imperative to reduce costs must not be an excuse to circumvent these constraints since they affect long-term economic, as well as ecological, sustainability. If meeting such environmental requirements results in added costs, those added costs must be reflected in prices. Also among the costs of economic activity are those for the necessary investments of capital and labor. These, along with the costs of material inputs, must be met by returns from satisfying the demand for products. A predictable demand is therefore just as important as a predictable supply since sustainability will be threatened as much by a decline in demand as by a decline in supply. Economic sustainability is constrained by anything that upsets a viable balance between benefits and costs.

References

1. IUCN. 1980. World conservation strategy: Living resource conservation for sustainable development. IUCN, Gland, Switzerland.

2. World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our common future. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.

3. IUCN/UNEP/WWF. 1991. Caring for the earth: A strategy for sustainable living. IUCN, Gland, Switzerland.