Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
2
A SUSTAINABILITY PRIMER
Rampant population growth coupled with a concurrent increase in per capita
resource consumption must be invariably unsustainable (Bartlett, 2006),
as the nonrenewable resource base that supports growth is finite and will
eventually be depleted. Even the might of human innovation and technology
cannot push back this natural limit indefinitely. There is good evidence that
the global carrying capacity has already been compromised, signaling an
urgent need to change our patterns of consumption to ensure sustainability
(Huang and Rust, 2011). If the present levels of per capita consumption in
the United States or Western Europe are extrapolated to the entire global
suggests that affluent lifestyles in some parts of the world are only possible at
the expense of less than modest lifestyles at other locations. An implication
even more serious than the geographic inequity in resource consumption
is the anticipated intergenerational equity. The present rate of depletion of
natural and environmental resources seriously threatens the well-being of
our future generations.
This is where the somewhat elusive notion (Hannon and Callaghan, 2011)
presented as a general prescription that somehow allows continuing
development and expansion while ensuring inter-generational equity in
terms of the availability of resources and ecosystem services. An endeavor
can only be sustainable in the long term only if it consumes resources needed
by the process at a rate that is equal to or slower than that for the
regeneration of the resources (Daly, 1990). (Today's global industry uses
fossil fuel energy and material resources at unprecedented rates dramatically
faster than their rates of regeneration.) The somewhat vague definition of
“sustainability” first proposed in 1987 (Brundtland) does not explicitly
articulate this. Despite its present-day political salience of the notion of
sustainability, this definition remains unclear, ambiguous, and qualitative
(Kajikawa, 2008; Taylor, 2002). It essentially requires growth or
development to be structured to meet the needs of the present generation
while not compromising the ability of future generation to meet their own
needs. This open-ended definition raises several questions:
