Sustainability

Contents

Sustainability

Introduction

Despite its popularity, the term sustainability is used in a wide variety of ways with a plethora of meanings. At the 1992 United Nations-sponsored Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, sustainable development was discussed in the context of a 1987 report entitled Our Common Future, which defined sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." However, challenges remain in understanding how this definition could be helpful in evaluating policy choices or business decisions, since avoiding impeding the "ability of future generations to meet their own needs" requires predicting both their needs and their abilities. More recently, industrial ecology has been referred to as the "science of sustainability", although industrial ecology itself is still emerging as a single recognizable construct.

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