Michael W. Toffel is an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School. His research examines various aspects of corporate environmental management, including how companies respond to public and private environmental programs.
- Should green building certification be guaranteed?
- Sustainability comes of age
- The bottom line on corporate sustainability
- Investors could cash in on building energy efficiency, report says
- ‘Can we feed the world without damaging it?’
- Sustainable Development News from New York Times
- More corporations are “greening” supply chains
- Science Daily’s Sustainability News
- Geographer working to clarify what sustainability really means to rural decision-makers
- UL environment and LG electronics announce first third-Party certified sustainable computer monitor
Introduction
Despite its popularity, the term sustainability is used in a wide variety of ways with a plethora of meanings. At the 1992 United Nations-sponsored Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, sustainable development was discussed in the context of a 1987 report entitled Our Common Future, which defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” However, challenges remain in understanding how this definition could be helpful in evaluating policy choices or business decisions, since avoiding impeding the “ability of future generations to meet their own needs” requires predicting both their needs and their abilities. More recently, industrial ecology has been referred to as the “science of sustainability”, although industrial ecology itself is still emerging as a single recognizable construct.
Natural scientific perspectives
Ecological and biological perspectives on sustainability focus on resource consumption and replenishment. For example, ecologist C.S. Holling notes that organisms are “exuberantly over-productive” but inevitably encounter “limits set by time, space, and energy.” Biodiversity is increasingly viewed as fundamental in providing ecosystems with stronger resilience to perturbations. Ecologists and agricultural economists have long studied the concepts of, and often attempt to quantify, “sustainable harvests” and “sustainable yields”. These refer to the amount of resources that can be farmed or fished without limiting its the ecosystem’s “carrying capacity” or, perhaps equivalently, damaging “natural capital”. Both refer to the ecosystem’s ability to regenerate resources to replace the harvested amount.
Sustainability frameworks
Sustainability is as much a construct in the social sciences as the natural sciences. Three popular frameworks that operationalize sustainability include the triple bottom line, The Natural Step, and the Ecological Footprint. In addition, several frameworks have emerged from peer-reviewed academic journals, including a method to calculate sustainable emissions and resource usage and the Sustainable Hierarchy, a meta-framework. The first framework emphasizes the need to balance economic, social, and ecological goals. The next three focus on measuring and reducing damage to the natural assets that provide ecosystem services necessary for human well-being. The fifth attempts to provide a meta-framework. While these frameworks avoid explicitly defining sustainability, they describe conditions, characteristics, and indicators of sustainability.
Triple bottom line
The Triple bottom line, initially proposed by John Elkington, suggests that organizations ought to manage not only their financial bottom line, but also their environmental and social “bottom lines” as well. The triple bottom line concept is being adopted by a growing number of multinational companies, despite challenges in determining appropriate environmental and social metrics, and in whether (and how) to aggregate these three “bottom lines”. Critics have charged that the concept lacks methodologies and formulae to facilitate calculating the social or environmental “bottom lines”.
The Natural Step
The Natural Step describes four “system conditions” for a society to be sustainable, “nature is not subject to systematically increasing (1) concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust, (2) concentrations of substances produced by society, or (3) degradation by physical means; and, in that society, (4) human needs are met worldwide”. According to this framework, the combustion of fossil fuels is not sustainable because it increases concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Nor are the emissions of persistent bioaccumulative chemicals, or the ongoing systematic loss of rainforests and wetlands. The Natural Step framework is being championed and implemented by affiliated nonprofit organizations in 10 countries. Several large companies including McDonalds (in Sweden) and Ikea have used The Natural Step framework.