The Concept of Sustainability
The Concept of Sustainability
Sustainability is the process suggested to improve the quality of human life within the limitations of the global environment. It involves solutions for improving human welfare that does not result in degrading the environment or impinging on the well-being of other people. Although there is no general agreement about the precise meaning of sustainability, there seems to be a general consensus that three basic concepts are involved in sustainable measures: living within certain limits of the earths’ capacity to maintain life; understanding the interconnections among economy, society, and environment; and maintaining a fair distribution of resources and opportunity for this generation and the next. In understanding its complexity, one popular framework shows sustainability issues as being classified into three categories: social/political, environmental, and economic issues. These three classes of issues are arranged as vertices of a triangle – depicted as Munasinghe’s triangle (Figure 1) – and imply that achieving sustainability involves finding solutions which balance the importance and impacts of each of the three categories (after Munasinghe, 1993, in Pearce, 1999). This provides a good classification system for sustainability properties, and highlights issues such as social and political impacts which have often been omitted from consideration in traditional design processes, or otherwise overshadowed by variables such as time, cost, and quality
Sustainability is the process suggested to improve the quality of human life within the limitations of the global environment. It involves solutions for improving human welfare that does not result in degrading the environment or impinging on the well-being of other people. Although there is no general agreement about the precise meaning of sustainability, there seems to be a general consensus that three basic concepts are involved in sustainable measures: living within certain limits of the earths’ capacity to maintain life; understanding the interconnections among economy, society, and environment; and maintaining a fair distribution of resources and opportunity for this generation and the next. In understanding its complexity, one popular framework shows sustainability issues as being classified into three categories: social/political, environmental, and economic issues. These three classes of issues are arranged as vertices of a triangle – depicted as Munasinghe’s triangle (Figure 1) – and imply that achieving sustainability involves finding solutions which balance the importance and impacts of each of the three categories (after Munasinghe, 1993, in Pearce, 1999). This provides a good classification system for sustainability properties, and highlights issues such as social and political impacts which have often been omitted from consideration in traditional design processes, or otherwise overshadowed by variables such as time, cost, and quality
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