Demand for sustainability in business environment (1)
Today’s businesses must develop a broad awareness and understanding of the economic, environmental and social changes and challenges they face, as well as the profit-making alternatives available to them based on their corporate governance framework.
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Corporate governance processes and structures in most businesses have evolved over time to rely on "low-demand" control mechanisms such as ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability.
There is a large body of literature on the first two dimensions of ethics and CSR, but the third dimension - sustainability - a catchword for good business practices in this context is now gaining traction.
Consequently, the business environment is evolving into a demand for sustainability, which considers how to conduct business without adversely affecting the environment, community or society as a whole.
Employee, client and supplier constituent communities now recognise that questionable ethical behaviours, challenges and issues such as bribery, kickbacks, false advertising, deceptive marketing, and environmental harm, among other actions, necessitate different but long-term responses or solutions, so they have risen to develop, use, and uphold more normative ethical standards that are sustainable in nature to deal with such ethical behaviours, challenges and issues.
Creation
The term “sustainability” originated in the practice of forestry, where it first meant not taking more wood from the forest than the forest needed to regenerate.
Hans Carl von Carlowitz's 1713 book Silvicultura Oeconomica documented the first use of the German term for sustainability, Nachhaltigkeit - and the content predated the act of conservation, growing, and using wood in a continuous, steady, and persistent manner.
Because many societies were dealing with deforestation, desertification, drought, soil erosion, silted rivers, urban air pollution, and intermittent crop failure, ecological harvesting of forests reflected a growing understanding of the importance of living within biophysical boundaries and preventing resource overuse.
Jared Diamond, an academic and science author, recently explained how historical societies collapsed due to overstretching local environments, and listed the five factors that will seal the ruin as:
• Environmental damage
• Climate change (man-made or non-man-made),
• Hostile neighbours,
• Friendly trade partners (or lack thereof), and the
• Society’s response to its environmental problems – all of which are related to von Carlowitz's and today’s concerns about the concept of sustainability.
Throughout the period, some societies or individuals recognised patterns of what has come to be known as "unsustainable living" and began to respond differently because the eighteenth century saw the continuation of Europe's unsustainable industrialisation, and other practices further activated an alternate path to destruction.
Following the deforestation and exhaustion of its lands, many European countries appropriated and exploited untouched resources in the foreign world to continue their quest for more resources.
Despite these complications, changing attitudes of humans and their relationship with the natural world served as rational foregrounds for the modern sustainability movement.
However, in response to the need to balance man's needs for optimal living conditions against nature's requirements, the Brundtland Report of 1987 established sustainability as a policy concept, balancing present needs against available resources, and short-term development against long-term development.
Six years later, in 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Rio Conference or Earth Summit, was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, breathing new life into sustainability.
Because the issues of sustainability were deemed too large for individual member states to handle at the time, the Earth Summit was held to mobilise other member states to act sustainably in preventing further environmental degradation.
Recently, it has gained popularity in the policy and development sectors as a reflection of desired public and international development programmes and has been championed by the United Nations System, first as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with an end date of 2015, and now as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with an end date of 2030.
Clarities
Though the term “sustainability” has grown in popularity as a societal goal in the business and development sectors, there is no precise definition, making it difficult to agree on a universal amid varied data.
According to some writers, it is part of a political agenda that articulates an ecological concept for which several research and assessment models were developed to study, measure, and highlight.
Others argue that, rather than meeting current needs, sustainability should be defined as the well-being of future generations in terms of non-renewable natural resources.
To the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN), sustainability is “a more constructive philosophy of social transformation and a more dynamic appreciation of the interplay between the environment, the economy, and human well-being.’’
This column and the subsequent discussions on this page will follow UNESCO's definition of sustainability as a long-term concern or goal.
Components
The three pillars of sustainability (environmental, economic and social) are intertwined and cross-cutting, but they are adopted independently by different disciplines due to each pillar's unique set of rules and procedures.
However, because the pillars are interdependent, a weakening of any of them could render the entire "societal goal" unsustainable, most efforts must be focused on utilising one pillar to solve a pressing problem at a time while drawing substantial support from the remaining two.
UNESCO states that “our greatest challenge is to sustain the planet that sustains us,” and this serves as the foundation for bidding to achieve the first pillar's ecological goal.
Environmental sustainability arose as a result of global disruptions and is intended to advance human welfare and sustainable development by safeguarding raw materials sources used for human needs and ensuring that human waste sinks are not exceeded while avoiding harm to humans and the environment.