Sustainability: Definition, What It Means and the Three Pillars

The word sustainable turns up on packaging and in company reports. It also has a written definition, dated 1987, and that definition talks about the economy and about poverty too.

The sentence from 1987

The World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) was established in 1983, and it is also known as the Brundtland Commission. Four years later it published the report Our Common Future, and there the formula quoted ever since appears: development has to answer the needs of the present generation while leaving future generations able to answer needs of their own. The United Nations carry it on their public pages, and the Italian encyclopedia Treccani takes it up in the entry on the subject. The Brundtland Report asked for a strategy able to bring development and the environment together, and to describe that strategy it used the very term that later spread.

Needs are the word at the center

The decisive word is needs. The Brundtland Report puts it at the heart of the criterion and gives absolute priority to the essential needs of the poorest people on the planet, as the Environmental Ethics entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports. The definition carries a second piece as well: how much the environment can give now and in the future is not a fixed quantity, because it depends on the technology available and on the way society is organized. Readers curious about how needs of that kind get measured will find the criteria in the Recap on the poorest countries in the world, and the distinction drawn in the Recap on poverty, inequality and underdevelopment.

The three factors Treccani holds together

The Treccani entry sets out three factors that depend on one another: care of the environment, the growth of the economy and the development of society. Treccani treats them as confirmed by the Johannesburg Conference of 2002. Interdependent means the three hold each other up.

Practical example: a town council has to renew its bus fleet. The 1987 criterion brings three questions instead of one: what the choice does to the environment, whether the budget can carry it over the years, who is left outside the service if the routes change. An answer that works for only one of the three leaves out the other two factors, which Treccani treats as interdependent.

Farming is one sector where these same three factors get a name of their own: sustainable agriculture, measured on concrete fronts such as soil, water, and biodiversity. In the energy sector the same criterion takes the shape of energy sustainability, measured on how much of the electricity and heat used comes from renewable sources.

Environment and economy arrive together

The United Nations write that sustainable development calls for an integrated approach, one able to hold environmental concerns and economic development together. That knot was already there in 1987: for the Brundtland Report the most critical global environmental problems came mainly from poverty in the global South and from the way the North consumed and produced, on models the report judged impossible to keep up. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reads in the report the same link between the environmental question and the question of development, set inside the inequality that separates the industrialized world from the rest of the planet. The setting in which that gap opened is the subject of the Recap on globalization. That integrated approach became a political commitment in 2015, when the UN adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, the 17 targets of the Agenda 2030.

The 1987 criterion also touches social policy, described in the Recap on the welfare state, and the human consequences of a warming climate behind climate refugees.