Sustainability: new strategic thinking for business

Some researchers insist that sustainability should be represented as a continuous quest, doubting that there is the ‘right’ way to be sustainable. Acknowledging the immensity of sustainability challenges, this article takes a different perspective, arguing that without understanding of concrete barriers and seeking solutions, the challenge of addressing unsustainable practices becomes unsurmountable. This article will summarize research in sustainability literature that indicates that sustainability requires a constant human population, as well as ecologically benign method of production. This article will survey a number of helpful frameworks that address the key obstacles to sustainability, namely population growth, and unsustainable production and consumption. These frameworks are discussed in the context of business-level solutions and production systems. As illustrated by examples of best practices as well as potential pitfalls associated with each system, these systems have the potential to move the quest for sustainability beyond ‘business as usual.’     

Footprints for Sustainability: The Next Steps

The concept of an ecological footprint is based on the understanding that every individual human appropriates a share of the productive and assimilative capacity of the biosphere. An ecological footprint corresponds to this exclusive biologically productive area that a defined population uses for all its resource requirements and wastes, and is expressed in terms of bioproductive space, with world-average productivity. Humanity's footprint or its aggregate ecological demand can only temporarily exceed the productive and assimilative capacity of the biosphere without liquidating and weakening the natural capital on which humanity depends fundamentally. Therefore, accounting tools for quantifying humanity's use of nature are essential for overall assessments of human impact as well as for planning specific steps towards a sustainable future.This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the ecological footprint as an ecological accounting method, points out research needs for improvement of the analysis, and suggests potential new applications. The paper identifies ten new applications of the tool to make it applicable at various geographic scales and for a number of analytical and didactic purposes. Then nine methodological improvements are suggested that could refine the currently applied method, making assessments more sensitive to a larger number of ecological impacts. It concludes that many crucial questions pertinent to building a sustainable society can be addressed by current ecological footprint research. By making the method more complete, this tool could evolve from being largely of pedagogical use to become a strategic tool for policy analysis.     

Sustainability of silicon feedstock for a low-carbon society

We need to ensure the sustainable management of advanced materials, such as purified silicon, that contribute to a low-carbon society. Because a drastic increase in the demand for photovoltaic (PV) systems is tightening the supply of silicon for PV cells, the sustainability of silicon feedstock needs to be explored. For this purpose, a material flow analysis of silicon in Japan from 1996 to 2006 is presented in this paper. Our analysis finds that rapid growth in demand for polycrystalline silicon (pc-silicon) and single crystalline silicon (sc-silicon) has changed the structure of the purified silicon supply. The strong demand for purified silicon for solar cells is responsible for this change. While off-grade silicon obtained as a by-product of electronic-grade silicon (EG-Si) covered the demand for solar sells before 2000, pc-silicon is currently produced independently for solar cells via an energy-intensive process. Analysis of the resource effective-use index (REI), which indicates how effectively purified silicon is used, shows progress in the effective use of pc- and sc-silicon. REI analysis indicates that the effective use of pc-silicon is reaching a maximum, while the effective use of sc-silicon is advancing, with a corresponding increase in price. To ensure a sustainable supply of silicon feedstock, this paper proposes four solutions: (1) production of solar-grade pc-silicon by a less costly and less energy-consuming method; (2) reduction in the amount of crystalline silicon per watt in solar cells; (3) acceleration of the development and deployment of other solar cell types; and (4) reuse and recycling of solar cells in the future.     

Pedagogy for Sustainability Science: Case-Based Approaches for Interdisciplinary Instruction

Sustainability science represents a fundamental shift in the nature of research on environmental problems, calling for specialists to expand beyond their disciplinary perspectives in order to cooperate together to understand and address systemic problems. This shift demands a corresponding shift in education in order to equip students with the skills, theories, and methods they need to address contemporary challenges. We argue that case studies are a productive pedagogical approach to teaching about sustainability and teaching for sustainability. Case-based approaches equip students to encounter complexity, manage uncertainty, and generate innovative strategies. In laying out of the pedagogical challenges inherent in sustainability education, we highlight opportunities and demands for environmental communication scholars to contribute to the emerging discipline of sustainability science.     

Soil and biodiversity

It is shown that the soil diversity-biodiversity system in terrestrial ecosystems operates in spatiotemporal unity, which manifests itself at different hierarchical levels of their structural-functional organization: successional-evolutionary, zonal geographic, landscape, biogeocenotic, soil-type, horizon-layer, geochemical, and the levels of elementary soil processes and soil fertility. Arguments confirming the functional relationship between organisms and soils are considered. Effective biodiversity conservation is possible on the basis of an ecosystems approach involving simultaneous conservation of soil diversity.     

The Sustainability Babel Fish

This paper proposes a quantitative measure of sustainability. Using primary energy as a metric, it enables decisions to be made across different activities such as electricity, fuel and water use. By relying on bill data, we eliminate the need for new measurements and readily connect to economics through market prices. We choose the primary energy content of a gallon of gasoline as the basic unit, which turns out to be the right size to appeal to common intuition. We highlight that there are no ‘one size fits all’ rules governing sustainability decisions. Rather, the appropriate choices depend on location, time, and personal attributes.     

Sustainability indicators for clean development mechanism projects in Vietnam

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is one of the flexible instruments of the Kyoto Protocol designed to combat climate change so as to bring advantages to developing countries and developed countries alike. Indeed, CDM projects have a two-fold objective: to offset greenhouse gas emissions and to contribute to sustainable development in the host country. However in many cases, the latter objective appears to be marginalized. This is at least partly due to the difficulties surrounding the definition and the measurement of sustainability, in particular in a developing country context. To assess CDM projects’ contribution to sustainable development in the host country, scholars and practitioners need adapted indicator sets. A set of indicators were developed by way of an iterative Delphi approach amongst selected Vietnamese experts. The Delphi approach allowed a systematic collection of the experts’ judgements on the sustainability indicators through a set of sequentially applied questionnaires, interspersed with feedback from earlier responses. This exercise resulted in the selection of a set of 36 indicators, which emphasise economic efficiency, public health and pollution issues. The exercise yielded a locally supported and context-specific set of sustainability indicators that will allow Vietnamese decision-makers to enhance the sustainability of the approved CDM projects. In the future this set should be continually improved through real-life application and further participation from local stakeholders. This study is a first step in a long-term process towards developing an adapted toolkit for sustainability assessment of CDM projects in Vietnam.     

Sustainability of natural resource use for an Amazonian indigenous group

This research examines how the Kandozi indigenous group governs access to fish and timber for sale and evaluates their perceptions of sustainability of those natural resources. The Kandozi occupy a biodiverse tropical forest in the northern Peruvian Amazon with lakes and seasonally flooded areas. Qualitative methods and a comparative examination of access to resources were used to explore current processes that shape access and the people’s perceptions of their benefit from natural resources. Results indicated that environmental heterogeneity, kinship, land tenure, the legal framework, and knowledge all shaped access with some differences due to the dissimilar natures of fish and timber. This research concludes that the sustainability of this and similar systems are dependent upon the moment at which the analysis is done, because of the changing needs of people over time, in addition to changes in external factors and the natural variations that occur in the resources used. The range of relations and interactions among different processes that shape access, and the historically contingent characteristic of access and its evolution over time, help better understand the complexity of a given social-ecological system.     

Creating a Place for Environmental Communication Research in Sustainability Science

Environmental communication scholarship is critical to the success of sustainability science. This essay outlines three pressing areas of intersection between the two fields. First, environmental communication scholarship on public participation processes is essential for sustainability science's efforts to link knowledge with action. Second, sustainability science requires collaborations across diverse institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Environmental communication can play a vital role in reorganizing the production and application of disciplinary knowledge. Third, science communication bridges environmental communication and sustainability science and can move communication processes away from one-way transmission models toward engaged approaches. The essay draws on Maine's Sustainability Solutions Initiative to illustrate key outcomes of a large project that has integrated environmental communication into sustainability science.     

Sustainability of radiologically contaminated territories

Decisions on appropriate countermeasures in the case of a contamination of large areas due to fallout from a weapon's detonations or a serious reactor or reprocessing plant accident depend on fallout level and the time period required for the exposure levels to fall below a given intervention limit. This is particularly relevant for countermeasures with high costs and substantial consequences to the population involved, such as relocation or soil perturbation. Natural processes which result in a decrease in activity concentrations in foodstuffs and external exposure with time, are least detrimental to the soil among all countermeasures proposed for rehabilitation of contaminated areas. The impact of these natural self-healing effects (soil sustainability) on the temporal activity reduction in foodstuffs, as well as their effect on the time period required for exposure levels to decrease to sufficiently low levels to allow unrestricted re-utilization and re-settlement of the land, are discussed. Depending on the type of foodstuff, in Central Europe this temporal decrease follows an effective half life of about 0.25-1.3 y from first to second year after fallout, followed by a decrease in milk with an effective half-life of 1-2 y in the next 7 y and about 5 y thereafter, while in cereals and vegetables in Austria a decrease by 2.3 y and in fruit by 1.3 y over a period of more than a decade is observed. In contrast, the decrease in foodstuffs derived from semi-natural environs is much slower by an effective half-life of roughly 8 y. The time-span for adequate recovery of a contaminated territory, therefore, depends on the fallout level and the radionuclides involved and the contribution of natural and semi-natural derived foodstuffs to the diet. It is shown that for 137Cs and a typical Central European diet the time span amounts to about 1 y for a deposition of 300 kBq m(-2) and to about 10 y for a deposition of 10,000 kBq m(-2). Thus it is demonstrated that natural restoration effects may contribute significantly to the environmentally safe and sustainable resettlement of an area substantially contaminated with fission products.     

Trends in environmental education for biodiversity conservation in Costa Rica

Costa Rica is internationally recognized for its abundant biodiversity and being a leader in the promotion of education strategies for biodiversity conservation. We interviewed staff from 16 institutions developing key environmental communication, education, and participation projects for biodiversity conservation in the country. Through content analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis and Chi-square tests, we examined the characteristics of the projects carried out by these institutions and developed a typology of four categories derived from six variables: primary audience, content, project purpose, location, scale, and facility. Then, we designed a conceptual model describing the integration of conservation and economic development in the educational projects. We found two key approaches related to this integration: vision of nature protection which aims to inform audiences of ecological concepts and focuses on schoolchildren and vision of sustainability which engages adult audiences and is management-oriented. Education for community-based environmental management may serve as a good example of educational projects which integrate conservation and economic development, implementing a vision of sustainability.     

Sustainability science: an ecohealth perspective

Sustainability science is emerging as a transdisciplinary effort to come to grips with the much-needed symbiosis between human activity and the environment. While there is recognition that conventional economic growth must yield to policies that foster sustainable development, this has not yet occurred on any broad scale. Rather, there is clear evidence that the Earth’s ecosystems and landscapes continue to degrade as a consequence of the cumulative impact of human activities. Taking an ecohealth approach to sustainability science provides a unique perspective on both the goals and the means to achieve sustainability. The goals should be the restoration of full functionality to the Earth’s ecosystems and landscapes, as measured by the key indicators of health: resilience, organization, vitality (productivity), and the absence of ecosystem distress syndrome. The means should be the coordinated (spatially and temporally) efforts to modify human behaviors to reduce cumulative stress impacts. Achieving ecosystem health should become the cornerstone of sustainability policy—for healthy ecosystems are the essential precondition for achieving sustainable livelihoods, human health, and many other societal objectives, as reflected in the Millennium Development Goals.     

Sustainability indicators of water sharing compacts

There is an increasing crisis of fresh water availability throughout the world. Sharing the available water resources in a sustainable manner among numerous stakeholders in the backdrop of this crisis is more challenging. Very often water conflicts are triggered out in this challenging scenario. These conflicts are sometimes reconciled with compacts on sharing. Water sharing compacts on both surface and aquifer resources are very common. Whether these compacts are founded on postulates of sustainability is the important question we want to investigate. Conflicts resurface when the sustainability of a compact is at stake. In this paper, we are reviewing three compacts on surface water sharing to understand their sustainability perspectives and how it has helped addressing conflicts. An introduction to various legal instruments promulgated aiming water conflict abatement is given first. Different types of water sharing agreements being signed in the current water management practice are also looked into. Theoretical background of sustainability analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, applicable in the case of water sharing models is then discussed. This is followed by specific case study analysis of three interstate water sharing agreements executed in basins of different agro-climatic regions across the world. It includes the Colorado basin (USA), Murray Darling basin (Australia) and the Parambikulam Aliyar Project (PAP) basins (India). Interstate water sharing agreement of these basins is critically examined and compared to comment on its sustainability perspective. The Murray Darling basin and its compact appear to be better in its overall considerations of sustainability. Compared to Colorado and Murray Darling, PAP requires major revisions in its sustainability context. E flows and stochastic modeling are the thrust areas of PAP that require major revision.     

The Spatial Dimension of Landscape Sustainability

Sustainability indicators are mostly derived from parameters which are, in the spatial dimension, more or less distribution-free. In the majority of cases, the indicators are based on statistical data on production, consumption, pollutants emission, land use, etc. This statistical approach is liable to mask sustainability risks which are primarily caused by specific spatial and temporal patterns of landscape and land use structure, such as degradation of soil functions, disturbances in the landscape's water balance, and losses in functional habitat quality.Sustainability risks due to ecologically non-adapted spatial landuse patterns require measures on regional to local scales, based on disaggregated, spatially explicit indicators. Depending on the respective planning and decision level, different levels of spatial aggregation/disaggregation have to be considered.In the concept presented here, a differentiated approach is proposed. For an aggregated assessment of landscape sustainability, long term monitoring of the dynamics of water flow and matter load at the outlet point of river catchments is recommended. A prerequisite for analyzing those measurements in terms of the catchments' land cover and land use pattern, as well as changes thereof, is a Geographic Information System (GIS) holding relevant up-to-date geodata sets. For a spatially more detailed indication of sustainability risks, an approach of GIS-based functional landscape assessment was demonstrated in a regional case study.The results show GIS on regional to local scales together with satellite remote sensing data on land cover and landuse to be a powerful data basis for spatially explicit landscape evaluation, provided that suitable models for assessing specific landscape functions are applied.     

Sustainability risk identification in product development

Sustainability-related issues present significant financial, strategic, compliance and operational risks to manufacturers. Many of these risks directly or indirectly result from the way a product is designed and managed across its life cycle. Assessing sustainability risk (S _R) at the product design stage is crucial for the development of products that both minimise sustainability risk exposure and are environmentally sustainable. Managing the costs associated with these risks requires risk management intervention at the design stage before these costs are committed throughout the life cycle (production, use, end-of-life). The goal of the sustainability risk assessment (SRA) methodology is to provide an approach to comparing the financial cost of a ‘sustainable product’ vs. an ‘unsustainable product’, by factoring in the effects of S _R on life-cycle cost. The SRA methodology demonstrates that, in some cases, sustainable products cost less than unsustainable products when sustainability risk is considered in the costing analysis. This paper outlines the first step of the SRA methodology, which is a process for identifying S _R inherent in the product life cycle. Once key risks are identified, the subsequent steps of the SRA assess and prioritise these risks for treatment through changes to product design and materials composition.