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.’     

Understanding and communicating sustainability: global versus regional perspectives

While there is no single definition of sustainability, most would agree that it implies that a system is to be maintained at a certain level, held within certain limits. Sustainability denies run-away growth, but it also precludes any substantial set backs or cuts. This sustainability path is hard to reconcile with the renewal cycle that can be observed in most living systems developing according to their natural intrinsic mechanisms. Besides, since different human dominated systems are in significantly different states and stages of development, sustaining those states assumes maintaining social disparities in perpetuity. This creates a challenge in communicating the ideas of sustainability in different regions. Systems are parts of hierarchies where systems of higher levels are made of subsystems from lower levels. Renewal in components is an important factor of adaptation and evolution. But then sustainability of a system borrows from sustainability of a supra-system and rests upon lack of sustainability in subsystems. Therefore by sustaining certain systems beyond their renewal cycle, we decrease the sustainability of larger, higher level systems. The only way to resolve this contradiction is to agree that the biosphere as a whole with humans as one of its components is the only system which sustainability we are to seek. Readers should send their comments on this paper to BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue.     

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.     

Structure of industrial or corporate sustainability programmes

The 15 years up until 2008 have seen an escalating growth in corporate or industrial sustainability programmes to a current level of about 25% of the Fortune 1000 firms. This preliminary study of corporate sustainability programmes yielded a repeatable structure of these programmes that may be unique to industry in the broader sustainability field. These corporate sustainability programmes are different from the prior corporate social responsibility programmes and also are a subset of the vast current use of the word sustainable. The corporate sustainability model is built on four pillars (business excellence, innovation, human contribution and environment) that offer important directions for long-term decision making. In-depth sustainability programme studies revealed recurring principles that reflect current industry or corporate sustainability programmes.     

Population, environment and poverty in Pakistan: linkages and empirical evidence

This study explores the interlinkages among population, environment and poverty and presents empirical evidence in a developing country like Pakistan. It gives alternative views on population environment linkages. It explains poverty trap, market based harmony, and dual effect of poverty on the basis of a link between population growth and natural resource degradation. In addition, the paper also highlights social and political instability through population-poverty-environment spiral. It also presents empirical evidence on population-environment-poverty nexus in Pakistan. It also compares environmental sustainability index and human development index for selected Asian countries. The paper also gives scores for different components of environmental sustainability index for Pakistan and compares these with India. The paper concludes that the causal relationship between poverty and environment works in both directions, often through changes in GDP and population. Population stress does not have any significant direct effect on all aspects of environmental status in Pakistan.

Economic Modelling in Sustainability Science: Issues,Methodology, and Implications

Sustainability science is a new branch of human knowledge. It is necessary to model sustainability science based on a framework consisting of the interactions of society, ecology, the environment and the economy. This paper develops such a model, the SEEOSG model, containing the essential structural relationships that incorporate the environmental and economic conditions required for sustainability. The model is solved as a dynamic optimisation problem. This optimal growth model of ecology and economic growth enables us also to analyse the issues which are specific to sustainability science such as the ecologically sustainability and inter-generational equity implications of economic activities and policies. In the model results growth maximisation goals appear to be fraught with difficulties such as infeasibility and non-sustainability. The results also suggest also that an equilibrium ecological and economic system does not sustain over a very long period of time unless appropriate actions are taken. Readers should send thier comments on this paper to: BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue.     

Research from global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to sustainability science based on the object-subject-process framework

Since United Nations adopted the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the next 15 years (2016–2030), sustainable development will further become a core concept and main principle to guide global and national economic and social development. According to this background, strengthening the integrative research on the theories and methodologies of sustainable development has been a strategically important mission. This article provided an analytic framework for sustainability science, named the object-subject-process (OSP) framework for examining the key issues encountered during the theoretical research and policy analysis. This study emphasized that, on the object dimension, sustainable development means to seek for economic and social development within biophysical limits of the earth and the relationship of environment, society, and economy should be containing and complementary rather than parallel and substitute; on the process dimension, sustainable development should adopt both the responsive and proactive strategies for the whole process management which employing pressure-state-response (PRS) model rather than dealing with one part of them; on the subject dimension, sustainable development research should involve the key stakeholders who are kind of collaborate governance rather than separate each other. From the perspective of sustainability science, green economy was utilized as a case study to explore the issues of object, process and subject and also the significance of green economy was discussed in this study.     

Environmental Implication of Intensive Farming Practices on North China Plain

Abstract

The current pressure on production resources of North China Plain, such as land and water to feed the growing population, necessitates the assessment of the sustainability of farming practices. This study focuses on the sustainability of farming practices related to groundwater and soil fertility management. The assessment is based on selected site-specific key indicators and their established threshold limits. The current farming practices in the study area are clearly unsustainable. Only about 6% of the surveyed farm households practice sustainable farming. The study stresses that farming practice, which is economically sustainable, should not be promoted at the cost of environment. Holistic strategies need to be developed and implemented that aim at balanced use of inputs, which satisfy both productivity and environmental concerns.     

Competing societal and ecological demands for groundwater: boundary judgments and convergence mechanisms in the Netherlands

Conflicts between human demands for clean water and terrestrial ecosystems’ needs for water are increasing. Such conflicts are stronger in the case of groundwater, as one of the cleanest forms of drinking water, and are expected to increase in frequency, in the context of population growth and climatic changes. This paper argues that behavioral approaches are essential not only toward understanding how socio-ecological conflicts emerge, but also how they could be overcome. A theoretical the framework is proposed, which suggests that the behaviors/actions of actors who sustain such conflicts can be understood by examining their ‘boundary judgments’ regarding natural resources and sustainability, in interaction with their powers/resources to implement the preferred behaviors. The concept of boundary judgements is rarely used in investigating sustainability conflicts. This concept is operationalized in relation to nature-society conflicts and applied empirically to illuminate the conflict in a case study from the Netherlands. Further, the theoretical framework suggests a parsimonious, yet comprehensive, typology of mechanisms that can be used to change/‘converge’ the behaviors and actions of the actors contributing to the problem, toward conflict closure. These are referred to as convergence mechanisms and can be persuasive, enabling or constraining. The paper concludes with reflections on the practical usefulness of the framework and concretes suggestions for further research, drawing on these convergence mechanisms and their interactions with boundary judgments on natural resources and sustainability.     

Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply

Human population growth has typically been seen as the primary causative factor of other ecologically destructive phenomena. Current human disease epidemics are explored as a function of population size. That human population growth is itself a phenomenon with clearly identifiable ecological/biological causes has been overlooked. Here, human population growth is discussed as being subject to the same dynamic processes as the population growth of other species. Contrary to the widely held belief that food production must be increased to feed the growing population, experimental and correlational data indicate that human population growth varies as a function of food availability. By increasing food production for humans, at the expense of other species, the biologically determined effect has been, and continues to be, an increase in the human population. Understanding the relationship between food increases and population increases is proposed as a necessary first step in addressing this global problem. Resistance to this perspective is briefly discussed in terms of cultural bias in science.     

Development of an educational model for sustainability science: challenges in the Mind–Skills–Knowledge education at Ibaraki University

Modern society confronts multiple sustainability challenges, including population growth, resources limitations, and a deteriorating environment. As a response, sustainability science education plays a major role in developing human capacity to manage these issues. This paper proposes the concept of “sustainability science education across Mind–Skills–Knowledge” as well as the competencies to be acquired and its pedagogy. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of such an educational system and its method of implementation using the example of the Graduate Program on Sustainability Science (GPSS), which was started at Ibaraki University in 2009.     

Exploring the need for more radical sustainable innovation: what does it look like and why?

It has been argued in recent years that Western economies need to increase their resource productivity by 90% over the next 50 years. This is a radical aim. This paper draws on design for sustainability (DfS) thinking to scope interventions that encourage greater levels of resource productivity through reconfiguring concepts of growth and well‐being within organisational strategies, structures, systems, processes and outputs. Based on research from a UK EPSRC funded project Design Dialogues (2005–2008), this paper links together sustainable design and innovation literatures and dialogue‐based primary research that together inform the development of an approach to innovation for sustainability. The emphasis on sustainable innovation is to understand what is designed (the outputs of business) and why (the inputs: the values, beliefs, visions and objectives) within a context of ecological limits. The foundations of this approach are introduced here in order to demonstrate the potential to provoke a new way of thinking about longer‐term organisational innovation through making explicit the intrinsic connections between natural and human capitals. This paper explores the need to think differently in order to create sustainability and presents the outcome of this research: a methodology for innovation for sustainability.     

Key competencies in sustainability: a reference framework for academic program development

The emerging academic field focused on sustainability has been engaged in a rich and converging debate to define what key competencies are considered critical for graduating students to possess. For more than a decade, sustainability courses have been developed and taught in higher education, yet comprehensive academic programs in sustainability, on the undergraduate and graduate level, have emerged only over the last few years. Considering this recent institutional momentum, the time is seemingly right to synthesize the discussion about key competencies in sustainability in order to support these relatively young academic programs in shaping their profiles and achieving their ambitious missions. This article presents the results of a broad literature review. The review identifies the relevant literature on key competencies in sustainability; synthesizes the substantive contributions in a coherent framework of sustainability research and problem-solving competence; and addresses critical gaps in the conceptualization of key competencies in sustainability. Insights from this study lay the groundwork for institutional advancements in designing and revising academic programs; teaching and learning evaluations; as well as hiring and training faculty and staff.     

Movement towards a low carbon emitted environment: a test of some factors in Malaysia

There exists a high global concern in different nations on environmental sustainability especially at the focal stage of increased economic growth and development process due to high level of environmental degradation and pollution. The major aim of this study was to empirically examine how to minimise carbon emissions (CO₂) in Malaysia which are mainly caused by energy production, fossil fuel consumption, population density and economic growth. The study adopted the method of autoregressive distributed lag bound testing approach to analyse the data for the period 1971–2011. The study found that economic growth in Malaysia has a direct relationship with CO₂ emissions in both the short run and the long run. Similarly, there is a positive relationship between fossil fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions over the same period. Population density was found to have positive impacts on CO₂ emissions. Contrarily, the relationship between the activities of energy production and pollution is negative in the long run. The study recommends that a targeted GDP growth rate should be set with the consideration to avoid more environmental pollution. In addition, the positive impact of fossil fuel consumption on the environmental pollution implies that there is a need to make and implement policies that will encourage the use of public transportation system more than private transportations. That is, the unnecessary use of private vehicles should be discouraged in order to reduce the extent of fossil fuel consumption.     

Application of an improved method for the analysis of pesticides and their metabolites in the urine of farmer applicators and their families

As the annual use of pesticides in the United States has escalated, public health agencies have become increasingly concerned about chronic pesticide exposure. However, without reliable, accurate analytical methods for biological monitoring, low-level chronic exposures are often difficult to assess. A method for measuring simultaneously the urinary residues of as many as 20 pesticides has been significantly improved. The method uses a sample preparation which includes enzyme digestion, extraction, and chemical derivatization of the analytes. The derivatized analytes are measured by using gas chromatography coupled with isotope-dilution tandem mass spectrometry. The limits of detection of the modified method are in the high pg/L - low μg/L range, and the average coefficient of variation (CV) of the method was below 20% for most analytes, with approximately 100% accuracy in quantification. This method was used to measure the internal doses of pesticides among selected farmer applicators and their families. Definite exposure and elimination patterns (i.e., an increase in urinary analyte levels following application and then a gradual decrease to background levels) were observed among the farmer applicators and many of the family members whose crops were treated with carbaryl, dicamba, and 2,4-D esters and amines. Although the spouses of farm workers sometimes exhibited the same elimination pattern, the levels of the targeted pesticides or metabolites found in their urine were not outside the ranges found in the general U.S. population (reference range). The farmer applicators who applied the pesticides and some of their children appeared to have higher pesticide or metabolite levels in their urine than those found in the general U.S. population, but their levels were generally comparable to or lower than reported levels in other occupationally exposed individuals. These results, however, were obtained from a nonrandom sampling of farm residents specifically targeted to particular exposures who may have altered their practices because they were being observed; therefore, further study is required to determine if these results are representative of pesticide levels among residents on all farms where these pesticides are applied using the same application techniques. Using this method to measure exposure in a small nonrandom farm population allowed differentiation between overt and background exposure. In addition, the important role of reference-range information in distinguishing between various levels of environmental exposure was reaffirmed.     

Assessing drivers of post-harvest losses: tangible and intangible resources’ perspective

Environment, Development and Sustainability - Many stakeholders in agro-food industry are concerned about sustainability, especially in addressing post-harvest loss (PHL). However, resources...     

Superorganismal Systems in Human Ecology

Comparison of the current approaches to human ecology shows a contradiction between certain views on the subject and the methodology of its analysis. The notion of human ecology as the ecology of the species Homo sapiens is being developed in terms of modern general ecology and should be considered at all organizational levels, from individual to global. Material and spiritual cultures, which are the main adaptations of human beings represent a continuation of the general trend of living matter towards progressive evolution and are accompanied by an increase in orderliness related to the intensification of energy consumption. This superindividual adaptation determines the human capacity for occupying new ecological niches without changing the hereditary background. Therefore, consideration of Homo sapiens at the superorganismal level is of special importance in human ecology. Analysis of this issue shows that the functional patterns of systems belonging to this level have certain characteristics in common with those of the population systems of other species.__________Translated from Ekologiya, No. 3, 2005, pp. 163–170.Original Russian Text Copyright © 2005 by Kryazhimskii, Bolshakov.     

Whose values count: is a theory of social choice for sustainability science possible?

If sustainability science is to mature as a discipline, it will be important for practitioners to discuss and eventually agree upon the fundamentals of the paradigm on which the new discipline is based. Since sustainability is fundamentally a normative assertion about tradeoffs among values, how society chooses the specifics among these tradeoffs is central to the sustainability problem. Whose values should count in making social decisions and how should the multiplicity of values that exist be known and used in that decision process? Given the vast spatial domains and temporal domains at work in the sustainability problem, we need some means of reconciling the inevitably divergent choices depending on whose values we count, how we know what those values are, and how we count them in making social decisions. We propose an approach to dealing with these questions based on Rawls (A theory of justice. Belknap Press, Cambridge, 1971) and explore the problems inherent in a social choice theory for sustainability science.     

Reimagining Sustainability: An Interrogation of the Corporate Knights' Global 100

This study examines sustainability reports of the Corporate Knights' “Global 100 Most Sustainable Companies in the World” in order to examine if and how they have been affected by Arturo Escobar's original critique of sustainable development (SD). Via thematic analysis, the study reveals that these corporations have circumvented Escobar's assessment by emphasizing sustainability as corporate growth and profit, without addressing some of the most prominent social concerns in our world today. The goal of this study was to trigger new ways of imagining SD, which speak to issues of equality and justice. Thus, it advances a view of sustainability that is driven by the logic of nature rather than by the logic of market. This study also suggests that researchers and practitioners should define praxis through engagement with local communities rather than through the traditional top-down approaches to sustainability.