Sustainability

Sustainability, in a general approach is the ability to maintain, to sustain or be sustained, to endure. But this concept is usually related to Environmental Science and can be understood analyzing the expression “sustainable development”. The main idea is to combine development and production with ways of preserving the environment. Thus, biological systems could be productive and with biodiversity along the time.

Sustainable development is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. Since the Industrial Revolution, when the world started to use fossil fuels as an energy resource, the environment is sending us messages that it is not everlasting and how much damage the human beings have done to it, such as the greenhouse effect, loss of biodiversity, climate changes, etc.

The term “sustainable development” was first used by the Brundtland Commission, and it was defined as: “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Sustainability is only possible if we take into consideration three basic pillars: social, environmental and economic. These three pillars build up the concept of sustainability and they are interdependent. If one of them is weak, then the whole system is unbearable.

Think and act sustainably can involve a bunch of changes: green technologies, renewable energy resources, sustainable agriculture, ecovillages, recycling, etc.

 

 

 

Related Themes:

Ecosystem

Biodiversity

Biosphere

Food Chain

 

Read more:

http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/

http://everything2.com/title/World+Summit+on+Sustainable+Development

http://www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/ThreePillarsOfSustainability.htm

 

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