Extract from ABC News
Sustainable development is a priority for anyone genuinely concerned about the environment.
Unless we as a society rethink our use of global resources, life, as we know it, will one day cease to exist.
The United Nations has made this an international imperative, setting out a series of 17 broad sustainability goals which it hopes can be met by 2030.
The corporate world has also come on board, with an ever-growing number of companies developing their own green reporting standards and committing to a sustainable future. Meeting those objectives is now a trillion-dollar industry.
The problem is, there's no consensus about what "sustainable development" actually means and how it should be measured.
Some researchers believe it's little more than corporate "greenwashing."
While others see it as a misplaced ideal that could exacerbate — rather than avert — social and environmental destruction.
Is sustainability even possible?
Academic Christopher Barnatt, from the website ExplainingTheFuture.com, describes sustainability as a "dangerous" concept.
"It gives the impression that we could all go on living exactly as we live today but sustainably — with this sort of magic thing wrapped around it," he tells ABC RN's Future Tense.
Sustainable development may be "politically convenient", he argues, but it has no real meaning in a world driven by exponential consumption and powered by unlimited extraction.
"As a physical concept, [sustainability] is impossible. Life itself is a physically consumptive process.
"The only way we can actually preserve things for the future and look after the environment is to change how we live, to use fewer resources, to value things in another way."
Climatologist Chirag Dhara agrees. While a focus on reducing fossil fuel use is laudable, he says, we have to be careful not to ignore the greater threat posed by the exponential consumption of resources.
"Our economy is highly extractive, whether it's agriculture [or] manufacturing. What's happening is our use of the raw materials, our material footprint, is growing in lockstep with the growth of GDP, our economic growth."
And that, says Professor Dhara, an assistant professor at Krea University in India, can't continue forever.
Even renewable energy technologies eventually need to be replaced, he points out. While they might be better for the environment, they're not cost neutral. They consume resources over the course of their lifespan and through the systems constructed to distribute the energy they generate.
"All of this technology is made possible through principles of physics and chemistry and mathematics that allows them to happen, but the same principles inevitably limit them.
"That means that if we want to preserve the current paradise of limitless economic growth," he says, "it has to be completely decoupled from the use of material resources."
And under the current system of global consumer capitalism, he warns, that's never going to happen.
An instrument of division
For Melissa Checker, the term sustainable development conjures up very different thoughts – ones of displacement and social inequality.
"The way it's playing out, it's undermining its stated intention," she says. And there are contradictions in its application.
Building a perfect Green Star-rated building loses all sustainable credentials, she says, if the land it's built on is a converted wetland.
An associate professor of urban studies at City University of New York, Dr Checker believes true sustainability and environmental justice are incompatible with dominant forms of urban development.
"Sustainability became a very useful concept in an effort to market New York city to more affluent residents and to promote the redevelopment needed to attract those upscale residents."
But, time and again, says Dr Checker, the end result has been a rise in property values which, in turn, has forced residents from lower socio-economic groups out of their homes and neighbourhoods.
It's also led to growing inequality in the provision of services and opportunities, she contends.
"As some neighbourhoods are being greened, other neighbourhoods are becoming more brown.
"Neighbourhoods that are not slated for gentrification or redevelopment are getting more toxic facilities, more industrial facilities and no green amenities. They are being sacrificed for the sake of redevelopment in these other places."
No consistent measurements
Dr Checker argues the concept of sustainable development has been hijacked by corporate interests. In the case of New York, she cites the powerful real estate and development sectors.
Her suspicions chime with recent research from Renard Siew, a climate change advisor with the Centre for Governance and Political Studies, headquartered in Malaysia.
Dr Siew, who also advises the World Economic Forum, says a lack of global consistency in the way sustainability standards are measured has allowed companies to game the system by picking and choosing the assessment tools that best suit their corporate interests.
"It's not surprising to see common indicators, common criteria such as carbon emissions reported differently. Which means it's very difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison."
A lack of standardisation, Dr Siew says, is also an issue with the rating systems used to assess the eco-credentials of new and refurbished buildings. But at the heart of the problem, he says, is the voluntary nature of reporting.
"It should be made mandatory, with really detailed requirements of what is expected in terms of certain criteria, to avoid situations where a company can cherry-pick indicators that they want to report on to put them in a good light."
He notes that both the European Union and the UN are now making moves toward compulsory sustainability reporting measures. But progress is slow.
Back to the future
Design expert Stuart Walker from Lancaster University advocates a return to the original concept of sustainable development.
The UN's Brundtland Commission developed the term as a way of structuring international assistance to the developing world. It provided a framework to ensure future development in countries didn't inadvertently destroy people's livelihoods and the environment.
It was a multi-faceted approach, says Dr Checker.
"They called for prioritising of ecological, economic and social sustainability.
"European cities really took it on. Also environmental justice activists really embraced the term as a way to think about the kind of calls they were issuing for racial justice and social justice along with environmental justice."
But, according to Professor Walker, the embrace of the sustainability ethos was soon corrupted and is now predominantly viewed through the lens of business and finance.
"If you separate them out, you're not getting that holistic picture."
For Christopher Barnatt, the elephant in the room is modern capitalism and the theory of planned obsolescence, where objects are deliberately manufactured to be disposable in order to maximise the potential for future sales.
"Economics basically tells us to consume as much as we want and it doesn't cost-in the consequences: recognising there isn't an infinite supply of resources and that there are implications for the planet and the environment."
The answer, he says, is not only to consume less but to value more.
"We don't have to go back that far to find generations of people who saved up to purchase objects which they kept, in many cases, for a lifetime. They valued the things they had."
"Consuming less doesn't necessarily mean having a less material world," says Dr Barnatt. "It just has to be a material world in which we have the things we have for a longer period of time."
A world where disposability is once again considered a waste, not a virtue.
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