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Envisioning sustainability three-dimensionally
Journal of Cleaner Production 16 (2008) 1838–1846
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Envisioning sustainability three-dimensionally Rodrigo Lozano* B.R.A.S.S. Research Centre, Cardiff University, 55 Park Place, Cardiff CF10 3AT, United Kingdom
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 12 July 2007 Received in revised form 25 February 2008 Accepted 26 February 2008 Available online 18 April 2008
Sustainability has arisen as an alternative to the dominant socio-economic paradigm (DSP). However, it is still a difficult concept for many to fully understand. To help to communicate it and make it more tangible visual representations have been used. Three of the most used, and critiqued, sustainability representations are: (1) a Venn diagram, i.e. three circles that inter-connect, where the resulting overlap that represents sustainability can be misleading; (2) three concentric circles, the inner circle representing economic aspects, the middle social aspects, and the outer environmental aspects; and (3) the Planning Hexagon, showing the relationships among economy, environment, the individual, group norms, technical skills, and legal and planning systems. Each has been useful in helping to engage the general public and raising sustainability awareness. However, they all suffer from being highly anthropocentric, compartmentalised, and lacking completeness and continuity. These drawbacks have reduced their acceptance and use by more advanced sustainability scholars, researchers and practitioners. This paper presents an innovative attempt to represent sustainability in three dimensions which show the complex and dynamic equilibria among economic, environmental and social aspects, and the short-, long- and longer-term perspectives. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Sustainable development Sustainability Graphical representations Venn diagram Concentric circles
1. Introduction During the last 30 years, there have been unprecedented advances in development and industrialisation, with results such as increase of up to 20 years in life expectancy in developing countries, infant mortality rates have halved, literacy rates have risen, food production and consumption have increased faster than population rates, incomes have improved, and there has been a spread in democratically elected governments [1–4]. However, it is increasingly recognised that such activities have been detrimental to economic, environmental, and social aspects. This has raised concerns that the resulting damage to the earth’s environment and quality of life for future generations will be irreparable [1–3,5,6]. In addition, conventional scientific traditions based on reductionistic cause–effect relationships are failing to explain and address the complex dynamic inter-relations among economic, environmental, and social aspects, and the time perspective [7–9]. The concept of Sustainable Development (SD) has appeared as an alternative to help understand and restore the equilibria among these. Although the roots SD concept can be traced back to the concept of Sustainable Societies which appeared in 1974 [10], it was the Brundtland Report [3] which brought it to the mainstream
* Tel.: þ44 (0) 29 20 876562, 7981900984 (mobile); fax: þ44 (0) 29 20 876061. E-mail address: [email protected]. URL: http://www.brass.cardiff.ac.uk 0959-6526/$ – see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2008.02.008
international political agenda by creating a simple definition that became widely quoted worldwide [6]. The WCED’s [3] defines SD as: ‘‘.development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’’ [3]. Many other authors have sought to define SD, with at least 70 different definitions that were compiled by 1992 [11]. Some definitions have focused only on environmental sustainability, e.g. see Refs. [12–21], principally through the use of natural resources without going beyond their carrying capacities and the production of pollutants without passing the biodegradation limits of receiving system. These definitions have been usually developed by scientists from countries and seldom consider the importance of social aspects (e.g. human rights, corruption, poverty, illiteracy, and child mortality) and their inter-relations with economic and environmental aspects. In societies and countries where the basic human needs, such as food, shelter and security, have not been fulfilled the environmental sustainability is often neglected. It is possible to separate the different SD definitions into the following categories: (1) conventional economists’ perspective; (2) non-environmental degradation perspective; (3) integrational perspective, i.e. encompassing the economic, environmental, and social aspects; (4) inter-generational perspective; and (5) holistic perspective. In some cases the boundaries between perspectives may be blurred. In the conventional economists’ perspective, sustainability suggests a steady state [22], with normative characteristics,
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Fig. 3. Sustainability representation using non-concentric adjacent circles. Source: adapted from Refs. [18,49,50].
Fig. 1. Graphical representation of sustainability using a Venn diagram. Source: adapted from Refs. [2,40,48–50].
and implying efficiency, i.e. the choice of a feasible level of consumption [23]. According to Goldin and Winters [22] economists have neither the theoretical nor the empirical tools to predict the impact of economic activities on the environment. This perspective sees SD as no more than an element of a desirable development path [23]. It also confuses sustainability with economic viability, i.e. sustained growth and self-sufficiency [24]. Such perspective has very limited scope, neglecting the impacts of economic activities upon the environment and societies of today, and certainly in the future. It attempts to simplify into economic terms natural and social phenomena. Bartelmus [25] stated that the value of the environment cannot be expressed in monetary terms. Equally, the value of societies and their individuals cannot be put in monetary terms. It is not possible to price the life of a human being, even if corporations and governments try to through compensation systems, e.g. the use of Pareto principle to changes in accidents and fatalities [26]. The non-environmental degradation perspective, with environmental economics as its main discipline, came as an alternative way to consider industrialisation’s negative effects on the environment. Two of the key authors of this group include Daly [27] and Costanza [13]. The definitions in this group converge in remarking that resources are scarce, consumption cannot be continued indefinitely, natural resources should be used without surpassing
their carrying capacities, and environmental capital should not be depleted [10,13–17,19–21,27–32]. In the majority of the cases, SD has primarily environmental connotations, e.g. see Refs. [12–17,19– 22,29,32,33]. Such connotations, in many cases come from individuals or groups from developed countries and do not consider the importance of social aspects, such as the interrelation between the environment and human rights, corruption, poverty, illiteracy, child mortality, and epidemics, amongst many others. A valid argument to consider in relation to this is that when any individuals and societies have not fulfilled their basic needs the long-term safeguarding of the environment becomes relatively unimportant, at least in the short-term. This perspective also fails to address the inter-relations among the aspects. This is in part explained by difficulties in analysing social systems [34]. Within the integrational perspective the key characteristic is the integration of economic, environmental, and social aspects, and the relations among them [2,5,30,33,35]. The following quote is a key example of this perspective: ‘‘Sustainable Development involves the simultaneous pursuit of economic prosperity, environmental quality, and social equity’’ [35]. There are many overlaps among the aspects [33], but they are not necessarily balanced [30]. This perspective is, comparatively, more complete than the previous two. Nevertheless, it lacks continuity, the interactions among the short-, long-, and longer-term, focusing mainly on current activities. The inter-generational perspective main focus is on the time perspective, by taking into consideration the long-term effects of today’s decisions, as the Brundtland Report [3] indicates of
Fig. 2. Graphical representation of sustainability using concentric circles. Source: adapted from Ref. [48].
Fig. 4. The systems of SD underscoring the relationships among the local, national and global levels and underscoring the need to integrate the social, economic and the environmental in a more holistic manner. Source: adapted from Refs. [2,40].
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Fig. 5. The Planning Hexagon: relations among economic/money trade, individual/personal beliefs, group norms/culture society, technical/administrative skills, legal/political systems, and physical/biological sources. Source: adapted from Refs. [51,52].
Fig. 6. Equalizing and merging economic, environmental, and social aspects (1Vd ).
satisfying the needs of today’s societies without compromising the needs of tomorrow’s societies. Some of the authors taking this perspective include Goldin and Winters [22], the WCED [3], Hodge et al. [36], Langer and Scho¨n [30], Stavins et al. [23], Hussey et al.[37], Reinhardt [32], Bhaskar and Glyn [38], Atkinson [12], Diesendorf [33], and Stavins et al. [23]. Although this perspective’s forte is its focus on continuity, in some cases it does not explicitly integrate the other aspects. Sometimes this perspective is critiqued as being too broad and vague, and difficult to ground in practical activities [11]. The holistic perspective explicitly combines the integrational and inter-generational perspectives. Some of the authors taking this perspective include Elsen [39], Lozano-Ros [40], and Lozano [24,41]. This perspective proposes two dynamic and simultaneous equilibria: the first one amongst economic, environmental and social aspects,1 and the second amongst the temporal aspects, i.e. short-, long- and longer-term perspectives. Although it is common to find the terms Sustainable Development and Sustainability used interchangeably, they are inherently different. Reid [6], Lozano-Ros [40], and Martin [42] state that the difference lies in SD being the journey, path or process to
1
Stakeholder participation is part of the social aspects.
achieve sustainability, i.e. the ‘‘.capacity for continuance into the long-term future’’ [42] or the ideal dynamic state. 2. Envisioning sustainability Different authors have appealed to the use of images, graphical representations, and models to help explain, raise awareness, and increase understanding and diffusion rates of complex concepts, as in the case of sustainability [12]. The use of images can improve learning and understanding of new or complex concepts, such as sustainability, especially when images are carefully selected and constructed to complement written text and not substitute it [43– 47]. In many cases, images are easier to remember than non-image data. They can also help to make the text more compact or concise, concrete, coherent, comprehensible, correspondent and codeable [sic] [43,44]. Visual representations can help to communicate, generalise and make more tangible concepts that are difficult to express clearly and succinctly with words, such as sustainability. However, even those professionally designed may not be perfect, instead of helping in the learning and understanding processes, they may have the opposite impact [44]. Among the different sustainability graphical representations used two stand out: (1) the Venn diagram (see Fig. 1) [2,40,48–50],
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Fig. 7. Integrating the economic, environmental, and social aspects to achieve full interrelatedness (2Vd ).
Fig. 8. Transformation towards the First Tier Sustainability Equilibrium. Interactions among economic, environmental, and social aspects from the Venn diagram (FTSE).
Fig. 9. Continuous interrelatedness among economic, environmental, and social aspects through concentric circles (1CC ).
where the union created by the overlap among the three components of economy, environment and society are designed to represent sustainability; and (2) concentric circles, where the outer circle represents the natural environment, the middle one represents society, and the inner one represents economic aspects (see Fig. 2) [48]. Some authors propose a model with embedded circles
but no concentricity or common middle point, e.g. Refs. [18,49,50] (see Fig. 3). These representations are mainly based on the integrational perspective. Dalal-Clayton and Bass [2] complement the Venn diagram representation by adding local, national, and global perspectives, which encompass four societal influences: politics, peace and
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Fig. 10. Transformation towards the First Tier Sustainability Equilibrium. Interactions among economic, environmental, and social aspects from concentric circles (FTSE).
Fig. 11. Intergenerational sustainability, designed to safeguard the rights and abilities of future generations to also meet their needs. Source: adapted from Ref. [40].
security, cultural values, and institutional and administrative arrangements. Lozano-Ros [40] incorporates technology as an additional societal factor (see Fig. 4). Another lesser known graphical model is the Planning Hexagon [51,52] (see Fig. 5), which is designed to model the relationships among economy, environment, the individual, group norms, technical skills, as well as legal and planning systems. These representations provide basic sustainability understanding, especially of the interaction of the three aspects. They are helpful in raising awareness for the general public. However, they suffer from different drawbacks. In the Venn diagram sustainability is represented by the overlapping area of the three circles, shown as ‘full’ (F) in Fig. 1. The areas lying outside of this are considered either as partial sustainability (P), the union of two circles, or not at all related to
sustainability. This implies that sustainability is only those aspects where the three aspects are united. This is flawed since it considers sustainability to be compartmentalised and disregards the interconnectedness within and among the three aspects. Another flaw of this representation is being a mere snapshot of a moment in time, which lacks the ability to represent the dynamic processes of change over time. The concentric circles model, Fig. 2, depicts a large circle or system, ‘the natural environment’, with a subsystem ‘society’, which has a further subsystem, ‘the economy’. Here, society is a part of nature, and the economy is a part of society. Nonetheless, the delimiting of the three aspects by the use of circles does not really reflect the complex inter-connectedness that actually exists among them. An example of such interrelatedness is presented by Hart [53] who argues that a conflict appears when a population starts invading natural reserves to obtain food and other short-term subsistence resources, such as fire-wood. In this case, humans take
Fig. 12. The Natural Step framework funnel. Adapted from Ref. [62].
Fig. 13. Integrating the time dimension into the first tier equilibrium (3D-Sust).
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Fig. 14. Disequilibrium in the time dimension. Lack of long-term perspective.
resources from the environment, breaking out of the social ‘circle’. It might be argued that in a sustainable society there would be no need to take resources outside of natural resources that are ‘‘assigned’’ for the use of the social system, but this implies that there are sufficient resources with no external factors (e.g. climate disasters, or political and military conflicts) leading to reductions in supply for the subsistence of a society. This has proven to be ever more difficult, especially in recent decades when economic and social activities are increasingly expanding and destroying the natural environment throughout the entire Earth; in the process humans, with a population of over 6.3 billion, are rapidly overwhelming the natural environment’s carrying capacities [54–56]. This helps to show that the concentric circles model is highly anthropocentric, implying that economy is at the centre of sustainability; typical in Western countries. This conflicts with the idea of balance among the three components. As with the Venn diagram it compartmentalises each of the aspects and lacks the dynamics of process change over time. The Planning Hexagon provides explicit relationships among economy, environment, the individual, group norms, technical skills, and legal and planning systems; opposite to the previous where the last four elements are included in the social aspects. As with the other representations it compartmentalises the relationships, and does not address the dynamic time dimensions. As with the Venn diagram and concentric circles, the Planning Hexagon can also be considered to belong to the integrational perspective. It is evident that these approaches seek to illustrate the complex concept of sustainability in a simple manner through graphical representations. Each representation has its strengths, such as ease of understanding and power of depiction to reach the general public. However, they all suffer from issues of scale; being centred on one point in time, being highly anthropocentric and compartmentalised; and lacking conceptual coherence, interconnectedness among the aspects, completeness, trans-disciplinarity, and dynamic time dimensions. These drawbacks have reduced their acceptance and use by more advanced sustainability scholars, researchers and practitioners. Representing the sustainability concept fully and accurately through graphical means is more difficult than it appears, but it is also clearly an important task to achieve. The following section focuses on an innovative attempt to represent sustainability in three dimensions, which is aimed to show the complex and dynamic equilibria among economic, environmental and social aspects, and the short-, long- and longer-term. 3. Envisioning sustainability three-dimensionally Useful tools for envisaging concepts rarely arrive fully formed; usually they are developed though an evolutionary process. The
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following paragraphs explain the mental process that the author went through to develop a new way of envisioning the vastness and complexity of sustainability. Modern societies that follow the dominant socio-economic paradigm (DSP), neo-liberal capitalism, are based on the importance and centrality of economic aspects, and a tergiversated ‘Free Trade’, which are raping the Earth for natural resources and societies [2,54,57]. History has shown that capitalism has not been alone in these processes. Socialism and communism also disregarded the impacts of industrialisation on the environment, as the Aral Sea’s shrinking dimensions and increasing salinity bear witness [58,59]. In all cases, the central importance has been given to economic aspects, under the names of development2 and industrialisation, while impacting or disregarding the environment and societies. This is shown in the left side of Fig. 6, which could be considered as a precursor of the Venn diagram and concentric circles models. The first step (1) in the quest for sustainability would be help to equalize the importance and integrate the three aspects, where the ‘relative’ importance and impact of the economic aspects should be equal to that of the environmental and social ones. In other words, to pass from the conventional economics perspective to the integrational one. Two different trajectories are proposed depending on the model used: Venn or concentric circles. To avoid further confusions, the morphology of the circles is used with the following note of caution3: most of the literature does not state what the circles represent. Usually they are referred to as aspects, dimensions or pillars. Do they represent economic, environmental and social capitals? Or do they represent the impacts that each has upon the other two? This author is inclined to believe that they represent a difference between the capitals and the impacts that the other circles have upon a particular circle. For example the economic circle should be the sum of all the different economic aspects, e.g. sales, profits, and revenues, among others, minus the negative impacts the economic activities have, in the short- and long-term, upon the natural environmental and social spheres. Some examples negative impacts include natural disasters, epidemics, union strikes, corporate greed’s deforestation of tropical rainforests to replace them with mono-cultures, and the global devastation created by the military industry that continues to enrich some through fostering wars. The first trajectory is comprised of three steps. The first step (1Vd ) depicts the change towards more balanced influence and power of the three aspects, i.e. reducing that of the economic aspects while increasing those of the environmental and social aspects (Fig. 6). In the graphical representation this is reflected by making the circles have the same area. The aspects must be integrated to reflect achievement of sustainability as the interaction of the three, as in the Venn diagram (Fig. 1). The second step (2Vd ) is to further unite the three aspects (see Fig. 7) to reflect that the economic, environmental and social aspects are interacting. Once this has been achieved, the circles need to continuously rotate so that the different parts of each aspect are dynamic contact with all the issues in the other two aspects. This means that each part is inter-connected to others in the same and the other aspects (e.g. carbon emissions are connected with energy which in turn is connected to production, and so on). The further fusing of the
2 It should be noted that in many occasions the term development is used to indicate economic growth, even though they are inherently different. The former being improvements in well beings, quality of life and the environment, the latter being an increase in GNP/GDP. 3 I would like to thank Prof. Peattie for making me reflect upon this particular topic. The reflections have helped clarify many of my deep thoughts about the circles and helped me to arrive at an interesting way of ‘seeing’ their interactions.
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circles results in the First Tier Sustainability Equilibrium (FTSE), see Fig. 8. The second trajectory results from the concentric circles model. It should be noted that Hart [18] proposed progressing from the Venn diagram to the three concentric circles, but this shows little interaction among the aspects and no longitudinal perspective. This would indicate retrogression to a time in history where economic activities had little impact on society and the environment, one that does not represent the status of modern societies. It also does not differentiate about economic activities that improve the environment or society and those which reduce them. In this trajectory the economic aspects expand and inter-connect with the social subsystem, where the economic aspects are related to social ones (1CC ) and go beyond economic theories that disregard the effect of social aspects upon economic ones. In the graphical representation this is equivalent to enlarging the economic circle and spinning it continuously so that each of its parts is in contact with each of the social aspects (Fig. 9). An example of this is profits, which are not directly linked to personnel. Typically, in calculating profits, the different costs are subtracted from revenues. One of the costs is that of labour; a problem with this is that labour is just another part of the equation and disregards motivation, culture and human needs amongst others. In many cases employees are considered to be liabilities instead of assets [60]. Similarly, the social aspects, including the economic ones, expand and rotate in ways that interact with all dimensions of the natural environment. As a result each aspect is interrelated with every part of the other two aspects. In the representation this could be viewed as only one circle, which is composed the dynamic interactions of all three primary dimensions. This creates the First Tier Sustainability Equilibrium (FTSE), see Fig. 10. As discussed, the Venn and concentric circles representations lack the ability to show the dynamic time dimensions. They appear only as snapshots, not fully representing sustainability. To address this, the time perspective, also referred to as the inter-generational aspect [3], is incorporated, into the three spinning circles. This means moving from the integrational towards the inter-generational perspective. Fig. 11 shows an example of a prior attempt to show this perspective. However, this does not show the interrelatedness of each aspect with the others, as in the case of the Venn diagram. Another representation aiming to include the time perspective is offered by the Natural Step (TNS) framework [61], presented in Fig. 12. The framework works in four phases: the first phase, awareness, involves aligning around a common understanding of sustainability and the ‘whole-systems’ context. The second phase, baseline mapping, is designed to provide an analysis of today’s activities and how they relate to sustainability principles. The third
phase creates a vision of how a sustainable society would look like. From this vision a strategy and action plans can be developed. These are based on ‘‘backcasting’’ from principles. Phase 4 consists of advising and supporting the execution of specific initiatives by providing appropriate training, techniques, and tools for implementation, followed by measuring progress towards goals and suggesting modifications as needed [61,62]. The funnel provides a comprehensive framework on how to move towards Sustainable Societies through backcasting. However, as a representation, it does not portray the interactions of economic, environmental and social aspects. Furthermore, it implies that sustainability can be achieved, while as previously mentioned, it is an ideal dynamic state. A better way to graphically incorporate the time perspective is to project the FTSE with no deviation through time, which would be equivalent to ‘exploding’ it into the third dimension (3D-Sust), thus creating a perfect cylinder (Fig. 13). When there are deviations the 3D-Sust changes its shape from a cylinder to two types of cones. The first one is when too much emphasis is put on the present, e.g. using discounting methods, and little or no attention is given to the needs of tomorrow, then, instead of a cylinder, the shape takes the form of a cone with its wider side in the present (Fig. 14). In an extreme case this would make the 3D-Sust regress to the FTSE. The second is when too much emphasis is put on the future but limited emphasis is given to satisfying today’s needs, then the cone would have its wider base in the future. The final step involves the interactions of both equilibria into a Two Tiered Sustainability Equilibria (TTSE). This is achieved by inter-relating the FTSE in dynamic change processes through time, passing from the inter-generational to the holistic perspective. In this case the FTSE may not be the same today and in the future. In the TTSE all aspects including the time perspective interrelate, for example the economic aspects of today with the economic aspects of the future, but also with the environmental aspects of the present and the future, as well as with the social aspects of the present and the future. These interactions occur with all the other aspects of the present and the long-term, which make the cylinder suffer a metamorphosis into a doughnut shape by imploding in the direction of the time axis (Fig. 15), for this to occur time needs to bend. In the TTSE sustainability issues lie inside the doughnut and are in perennial movement inter-relating with other issues, continuously rotating in the two axes shown in the figure. This is aimed at helping to represent sustainability more clearly and completely. 4. Conclusions Modern ideologies that rely on short-term economic profits, and scientific traditions based on reductionistic cause–effect relationships are failing to explain and address the complex dynamic inter-
Fig. 15. Two Tiered Sustainability Equilibria (TTSE). Interactions between the First Tier Sustainability Equilibrium, i.e. among economic, environmental, and social aspects; and the Second Tier Sustainability Equilibrium, i.e. the short-, long- and longer-terms.
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relations among economic, environmental, and social aspects and the time perspective. The concepts of Sustainable Development (SD) and sustainability have appeared as alternatives to help to understand, address and reduce current, and potentially future, economic disparities, environmental degradation, and social ailments. However, these concepts are still unfamiliar to, or are misunderstood by many individuals and societies worldwide. In order to achieve real change it is necessary to facilitate greater awareness and understanding within and throughout societies. Although graphical representations, such as the Venn diagram, concentric circles, and the Sustainability Hexagon, can help the general public grasp the different aspects of SD and sustainability, they suffer from several drawbacks, such as the depiction of sustainability as a steady state, a lack of full integration and interrelatedness amongst the different aspects, and a lack of consideration of the dynamic time perspectives. These drawbacks have been recognised by a number of sustainability scholars, researchers and practitioners, who have challenged their accuracy and power to depict sustainability. This author proposes a new way of depicting sustainability, the Two Tiered Sustainability Equilibria (TTSE), where the issues in each aspect (economic, environmental and social), interact with each other, with issues in other aspects, and through time. The TTSE shows the complex inter-linkages and inter-relations between the First and Second Tier Sustainability Equilibria. It is hoped that the TTSE visual model will help people to more effectively understand that in order for us to achieve societal sustainability we must use holistic, continuous and interrelated phenomena amongst economic, environmental, and social aspects, and that each of our decisions has implications for all of the aspects today and in the future. This author welcomes your feedback and suggestions for further improvements. Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Miss Frances Hines, Prof. Don Huisingh, Prof. Francisco Lozano and Prof. Ken Peattie for their critiques and comments, and excellent recommendations for ways to improve this document. References [1] Carley M, Christie I. Managing sustainable development. 2nd ed. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd; 2000. p. 322. [2] Dalal-Clayton B, Bass S. Sustainable development strategies. 1st ed. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd; 2002. p. 358. [3] WCED. Our common future. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1987. [4] Korten DC. When corporations rule the world. 2nd ed. Bloomfield, Connecticut: Kumarian Press Inc.; 2001. [5] Cairns Jr J. Will the real sustainability concept please stand up? Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 2004:49–52. [6] Reid D. Sustainable development. An introductory guide. 1st ed. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd; 1995. p. 254. [7] Roorda N. AISHE: auditing instrument for sustainable higher education. Dutch Committee for Sustainable Higher Education; 2001. [8] Rosner WJ. Mental models for sustainability. Journal of Cleaner Production 1995;3(1–2):107–21. [9] Senge PM. The fifth discipline. The art & practice of the learning organization. London: Random House Business Books; 1999. [10] Dresner S. The principles of sustainability. 1st ed. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd; 2002. p. 200. [11] Kirkby J, O’Keefe P, Timberlake L. The Earthscan reader in sustainable development. 1st ed. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd; 1995. p. 371. [12] Atkinson G. Measuring corporate sustainability. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 2000;43(2):235–52. [13] Costanza R. Ecological economics. The science and management of sustainability. New York: Columbia University Press; 1991. p. 525. [14] Currie-Alder B. Barriers to sustainability: problems inhibiting the success of SANREM-Ecuador; 1997. [15] Dobers P, Wolff R. Competing with ‘soft’ issues – from managing the environment to sustainable business strategies. Business Strategy and the Environment 2000;9:143–50. [16] Doppelt B. Leading change toward sustainability. A change-management guide for business, government and civil society. Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing; 2003.
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New York: Longman; 2002. [46] Stokes S. Visual literacy in teaching and learning: a literature review. Electronic Journal for the Integration of Technology in Education 2001;1(1). [47] Sankey M. Visual and multiple representations in learning materials: an issue of literacy. University of Southern Queensland; 2003. [48] Mitchell C. Integrating sustainability in chemical engineering practice and education. Transactions of the Institution for Chemical Engineering 2000; 78(B):237–42. [49] Mebratu D. Sustainability and sustainable development: historical and conceptual review. Environmental Impact Assessment Review 1998;18:493–520. [50] Peattie K. Environmental marketing management. Meeting the green challenge. London: Financial Times. Pitman Publishing; 1995. [51] Benson DE. Move ahead with the past for wildlife and nature conservation. In: Transactions of the 2002 North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference Washington, DC; 2002. p. 161–77. [52] Benson DE, Darracq EG. 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[59] Waltham T, Sholji I. The demise of the Aral Sea – an environmental disaster. Geology Today 2001;17(6):218–24. [60] Drucker P. They’re not employees, They’re People. Harvard Business Review 2002:71–7. [61] Robert K-H. Tools and concepts for sustainable development, how do they relate to a general framework for sustainable development, and to each other? Journal of Cleaner Production 2000;8:243–54. [62] The Natural Step New Zealand. The Natural Step Framework [accessed 15.02. 08]. Available from: Implementation methodology http://www.naturalstep. org.nz/tns-f-implementation.asp 2007.
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Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro
Envisioning sustainability three-dimensionally Rodrigo Lozano* B.R.A.S.S. Research Centre, Cardiff University, 55 Park Place, Cardiff CF10 3AT, United Kingdom
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 12 July 2007 Received in revised form 25 February 2008 Accepted 26 February 2008 Available online 18 April 2008
Sustainability has arisen as an alternative to the dominant socio-economic paradigm (DSP). However, it is still a difficult concept for many to fully understand. To help to communicate it and make it more tangible visual representations have been used. Three of the most used, and critiqued, sustainability representations are: (1) a Venn diagram, i.e. three circles that inter-connect, where the resulting overlap that represents sustainability can be misleading; (2) three concentric circles, the inner circle representing economic aspects, the middle social aspects, and the outer environmental aspects; and (3) the Planning Hexagon, showing the relationships among economy, environment, the individual, group norms, technical skills, and legal and planning systems. Each has been useful in helping to engage the general public and raising sustainability awareness. However, they all suffer from being highly anthropocentric, compartmentalised, and lacking completeness and continuity. These drawbacks have reduced their acceptance and use by more advanced sustainability scholars, researchers and practitioners. This paper presents an innovative attempt to represent sustainability in three dimensions which show the complex and dynamic equilibria among economic, environmental and social aspects, and the short-, long- and longer-term perspectives. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Sustainable development Sustainability Graphical representations Venn diagram Concentric circles
1. Introduction During the last 30 years, there have been unprecedented advances in development and industrialisation, with results such as increase of up to 20 years in life expectancy in developing countries, infant mortality rates have halved, literacy rates have risen, food production and consumption have increased faster than population rates, incomes have improved, and there has been a spread in democratically elected governments [1–4]. However, it is increasingly recognised that such activities have been detrimental to economic, environmental, and social aspects. This has raised concerns that the resulting damage to the earth’s environment and quality of life for future generations will be irreparable [1–3,5,6]. In addition, conventional scientific traditions based on reductionistic cause–effect relationships are failing to explain and address the complex dynamic inter-relations among economic, environmental, and social aspects, and the time perspective [7–9]. The concept of Sustainable Development (SD) has appeared as an alternative to help understand and restore the equilibria among these. Although the roots SD concept can be traced back to the concept of Sustainable Societies which appeared in 1974 [10], it was the Brundtland Report [3] which brought it to the mainstream
* Tel.: þ44 (0) 29 20 876562, 7981900984 (mobile); fax: þ44 (0) 29 20 876061. E-mail address: [email protected]. URL: http://www.brass.cardiff.ac.uk 0959-6526/$ – see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2008.02.008
international political agenda by creating a simple definition that became widely quoted worldwide [6]. The WCED’s [3] defines SD as: ‘‘.development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’’ [3]. Many other authors have sought to define SD, with at least 70 different definitions that were compiled by 1992 [11]. Some definitions have focused only on environmental sustainability, e.g. see Refs. [12–21], principally through the use of natural resources without going beyond their carrying capacities and the production of pollutants without passing the biodegradation limits of receiving system. These definitions have been usually developed by scientists from countries and seldom consider the importance of social aspects (e.g. human rights, corruption, poverty, illiteracy, and child mortality) and their inter-relations with economic and environmental aspects. In societies and countries where the basic human needs, such as food, shelter and security, have not been fulfilled the environmental sustainability is often neglected. It is possible to separate the different SD definitions into the following categories: (1) conventional economists’ perspective; (2) non-environmental degradation perspective; (3) integrational perspective, i.e. encompassing the economic, environmental, and social aspects; (4) inter-generational perspective; and (5) holistic perspective. In some cases the boundaries between perspectives may be blurred. In the conventional economists’ perspective, sustainability suggests a steady state [22], with normative characteristics,
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Fig. 3. Sustainability representation using non-concentric adjacent circles. Source: adapted from Refs. [18,49,50].
Fig. 1. Graphical representation of sustainability using a Venn diagram. Source: adapted from Refs. [2,40,48–50].
and implying efficiency, i.e. the choice of a feasible level of consumption [23]. According to Goldin and Winters [22] economists have neither the theoretical nor the empirical tools to predict the impact of economic activities on the environment. This perspective sees SD as no more than an element of a desirable development path [23]. It also confuses sustainability with economic viability, i.e. sustained growth and self-sufficiency [24]. Such perspective has very limited scope, neglecting the impacts of economic activities upon the environment and societies of today, and certainly in the future. It attempts to simplify into economic terms natural and social phenomena. Bartelmus [25] stated that the value of the environment cannot be expressed in monetary terms. Equally, the value of societies and their individuals cannot be put in monetary terms. It is not possible to price the life of a human being, even if corporations and governments try to through compensation systems, e.g. the use of Pareto principle to changes in accidents and fatalities [26]. The non-environmental degradation perspective, with environmental economics as its main discipline, came as an alternative way to consider industrialisation’s negative effects on the environment. Two of the key authors of this group include Daly [27] and Costanza [13]. The definitions in this group converge in remarking that resources are scarce, consumption cannot be continued indefinitely, natural resources should be used without surpassing
their carrying capacities, and environmental capital should not be depleted [10,13–17,19–21,27–32]. In the majority of the cases, SD has primarily environmental connotations, e.g. see Refs. [12–17,19– 22,29,32,33]. Such connotations, in many cases come from individuals or groups from developed countries and do not consider the importance of social aspects, such as the interrelation between the environment and human rights, corruption, poverty, illiteracy, child mortality, and epidemics, amongst many others. A valid argument to consider in relation to this is that when any individuals and societies have not fulfilled their basic needs the long-term safeguarding of the environment becomes relatively unimportant, at least in the short-term. This perspective also fails to address the inter-relations among the aspects. This is in part explained by difficulties in analysing social systems [34]. Within the integrational perspective the key characteristic is the integration of economic, environmental, and social aspects, and the relations among them [2,5,30,33,35]. The following quote is a key example of this perspective: ‘‘Sustainable Development involves the simultaneous pursuit of economic prosperity, environmental quality, and social equity’’ [35]. There are many overlaps among the aspects [33], but they are not necessarily balanced [30]. This perspective is, comparatively, more complete than the previous two. Nevertheless, it lacks continuity, the interactions among the short-, long-, and longer-term, focusing mainly on current activities. The inter-generational perspective main focus is on the time perspective, by taking into consideration the long-term effects of today’s decisions, as the Brundtland Report [3] indicates of
Fig. 2. Graphical representation of sustainability using concentric circles. Source: adapted from Ref. [48].
Fig. 4. The systems of SD underscoring the relationships among the local, national and global levels and underscoring the need to integrate the social, economic and the environmental in a more holistic manner. Source: adapted from Refs. [2,40].
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Fig. 5. The Planning Hexagon: relations among economic/money trade, individual/personal beliefs, group norms/culture society, technical/administrative skills, legal/political systems, and physical/biological sources. Source: adapted from Refs. [51,52].
Fig. 6. Equalizing and merging economic, environmental, and social aspects (1Vd ).
satisfying the needs of today’s societies without compromising the needs of tomorrow’s societies. Some of the authors taking this perspective include Goldin and Winters [22], the WCED [3], Hodge et al. [36], Langer and Scho¨n [30], Stavins et al. [23], Hussey et al.[37], Reinhardt [32], Bhaskar and Glyn [38], Atkinson [12], Diesendorf [33], and Stavins et al. [23]. Although this perspective’s forte is its focus on continuity, in some cases it does not explicitly integrate the other aspects. Sometimes this perspective is critiqued as being too broad and vague, and difficult to ground in practical activities [11]. The holistic perspective explicitly combines the integrational and inter-generational perspectives. Some of the authors taking this perspective include Elsen [39], Lozano-Ros [40], and Lozano [24,41]. This perspective proposes two dynamic and simultaneous equilibria: the first one amongst economic, environmental and social aspects,1 and the second amongst the temporal aspects, i.e. short-, long- and longer-term perspectives. Although it is common to find the terms Sustainable Development and Sustainability used interchangeably, they are inherently different. Reid [6], Lozano-Ros [40], and Martin [42] state that the difference lies in SD being the journey, path or process to
1
Stakeholder participation is part of the social aspects.
achieve sustainability, i.e. the ‘‘.capacity for continuance into the long-term future’’ [42] or the ideal dynamic state. 2. Envisioning sustainability Different authors have appealed to the use of images, graphical representations, and models to help explain, raise awareness, and increase understanding and diffusion rates of complex concepts, as in the case of sustainability [12]. The use of images can improve learning and understanding of new or complex concepts, such as sustainability, especially when images are carefully selected and constructed to complement written text and not substitute it [43– 47]. In many cases, images are easier to remember than non-image data. They can also help to make the text more compact or concise, concrete, coherent, comprehensible, correspondent and codeable [sic] [43,44]. Visual representations can help to communicate, generalise and make more tangible concepts that are difficult to express clearly and succinctly with words, such as sustainability. However, even those professionally designed may not be perfect, instead of helping in the learning and understanding processes, they may have the opposite impact [44]. Among the different sustainability graphical representations used two stand out: (1) the Venn diagram (see Fig. 1) [2,40,48–50],
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Fig. 7. Integrating the economic, environmental, and social aspects to achieve full interrelatedness (2Vd ).
Fig. 8. Transformation towards the First Tier Sustainability Equilibrium. Interactions among economic, environmental, and social aspects from the Venn diagram (FTSE).
Fig. 9. Continuous interrelatedness among economic, environmental, and social aspects through concentric circles (1CC ).
where the union created by the overlap among the three components of economy, environment and society are designed to represent sustainability; and (2) concentric circles, where the outer circle represents the natural environment, the middle one represents society, and the inner one represents economic aspects (see Fig. 2) [48]. Some authors propose a model with embedded circles
but no concentricity or common middle point, e.g. Refs. [18,49,50] (see Fig. 3). These representations are mainly based on the integrational perspective. Dalal-Clayton and Bass [2] complement the Venn diagram representation by adding local, national, and global perspectives, which encompass four societal influences: politics, peace and
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Fig. 10. Transformation towards the First Tier Sustainability Equilibrium. Interactions among economic, environmental, and social aspects from concentric circles (FTSE).
Fig. 11. Intergenerational sustainability, designed to safeguard the rights and abilities of future generations to also meet their needs. Source: adapted from Ref. [40].
security, cultural values, and institutional and administrative arrangements. Lozano-Ros [40] incorporates technology as an additional societal factor (see Fig. 4). Another lesser known graphical model is the Planning Hexagon [51,52] (see Fig. 5), which is designed to model the relationships among economy, environment, the individual, group norms, technical skills, as well as legal and planning systems. These representations provide basic sustainability understanding, especially of the interaction of the three aspects. They are helpful in raising awareness for the general public. However, they suffer from different drawbacks. In the Venn diagram sustainability is represented by the overlapping area of the three circles, shown as ‘full’ (F) in Fig. 1. The areas lying outside of this are considered either as partial sustainability (P), the union of two circles, or not at all related to
sustainability. This implies that sustainability is only those aspects where the three aspects are united. This is flawed since it considers sustainability to be compartmentalised and disregards the interconnectedness within and among the three aspects. Another flaw of this representation is being a mere snapshot of a moment in time, which lacks the ability to represent the dynamic processes of change over time. The concentric circles model, Fig. 2, depicts a large circle or system, ‘the natural environment’, with a subsystem ‘society’, which has a further subsystem, ‘the economy’. Here, society is a part of nature, and the economy is a part of society. Nonetheless, the delimiting of the three aspects by the use of circles does not really reflect the complex inter-connectedness that actually exists among them. An example of such interrelatedness is presented by Hart [53] who argues that a conflict appears when a population starts invading natural reserves to obtain food and other short-term subsistence resources, such as fire-wood. In this case, humans take
Fig. 12. The Natural Step framework funnel. Adapted from Ref. [62].
Fig. 13. Integrating the time dimension into the first tier equilibrium (3D-Sust).
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Fig. 14. Disequilibrium in the time dimension. Lack of long-term perspective.
resources from the environment, breaking out of the social ‘circle’. It might be argued that in a sustainable society there would be no need to take resources outside of natural resources that are ‘‘assigned’’ for the use of the social system, but this implies that there are sufficient resources with no external factors (e.g. climate disasters, or political and military conflicts) leading to reductions in supply for the subsistence of a society. This has proven to be ever more difficult, especially in recent decades when economic and social activities are increasingly expanding and destroying the natural environment throughout the entire Earth; in the process humans, with a population of over 6.3 billion, are rapidly overwhelming the natural environment’s carrying capacities [54–56]. This helps to show that the concentric circles model is highly anthropocentric, implying that economy is at the centre of sustainability; typical in Western countries. This conflicts with the idea of balance among the three components. As with the Venn diagram it compartmentalises each of the aspects and lacks the dynamics of process change over time. The Planning Hexagon provides explicit relationships among economy, environment, the individual, group norms, technical skills, and legal and planning systems; opposite to the previous where the last four elements are included in the social aspects. As with the other representations it compartmentalises the relationships, and does not address the dynamic time dimensions. As with the Venn diagram and concentric circles, the Planning Hexagon can also be considered to belong to the integrational perspective. It is evident that these approaches seek to illustrate the complex concept of sustainability in a simple manner through graphical representations. Each representation has its strengths, such as ease of understanding and power of depiction to reach the general public. However, they all suffer from issues of scale; being centred on one point in time, being highly anthropocentric and compartmentalised; and lacking conceptual coherence, interconnectedness among the aspects, completeness, trans-disciplinarity, and dynamic time dimensions. These drawbacks have reduced their acceptance and use by more advanced sustainability scholars, researchers and practitioners. Representing the sustainability concept fully and accurately through graphical means is more difficult than it appears, but it is also clearly an important task to achieve. The following section focuses on an innovative attempt to represent sustainability in three dimensions, which is aimed to show the complex and dynamic equilibria among economic, environmental and social aspects, and the short-, long- and longer-term. 3. Envisioning sustainability three-dimensionally Useful tools for envisaging concepts rarely arrive fully formed; usually they are developed though an evolutionary process. The
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following paragraphs explain the mental process that the author went through to develop a new way of envisioning the vastness and complexity of sustainability. Modern societies that follow the dominant socio-economic paradigm (DSP), neo-liberal capitalism, are based on the importance and centrality of economic aspects, and a tergiversated ‘Free Trade’, which are raping the Earth for natural resources and societies [2,54,57]. History has shown that capitalism has not been alone in these processes. Socialism and communism also disregarded the impacts of industrialisation on the environment, as the Aral Sea’s shrinking dimensions and increasing salinity bear witness [58,59]. In all cases, the central importance has been given to economic aspects, under the names of development2 and industrialisation, while impacting or disregarding the environment and societies. This is shown in the left side of Fig. 6, which could be considered as a precursor of the Venn diagram and concentric circles models. The first step (1) in the quest for sustainability would be help to equalize the importance and integrate the three aspects, where the ‘relative’ importance and impact of the economic aspects should be equal to that of the environmental and social ones. In other words, to pass from the conventional economics perspective to the integrational one. Two different trajectories are proposed depending on the model used: Venn or concentric circles. To avoid further confusions, the morphology of the circles is used with the following note of caution3: most of the literature does not state what the circles represent. Usually they are referred to as aspects, dimensions or pillars. Do they represent economic, environmental and social capitals? Or do they represent the impacts that each has upon the other two? This author is inclined to believe that they represent a difference between the capitals and the impacts that the other circles have upon a particular circle. For example the economic circle should be the sum of all the different economic aspects, e.g. sales, profits, and revenues, among others, minus the negative impacts the economic activities have, in the short- and long-term, upon the natural environmental and social spheres. Some examples negative impacts include natural disasters, epidemics, union strikes, corporate greed’s deforestation of tropical rainforests to replace them with mono-cultures, and the global devastation created by the military industry that continues to enrich some through fostering wars. The first trajectory is comprised of three steps. The first step (1Vd ) depicts the change towards more balanced influence and power of the three aspects, i.e. reducing that of the economic aspects while increasing those of the environmental and social aspects (Fig. 6). In the graphical representation this is reflected by making the circles have the same area. The aspects must be integrated to reflect achievement of sustainability as the interaction of the three, as in the Venn diagram (Fig. 1). The second step (2Vd ) is to further unite the three aspects (see Fig. 7) to reflect that the economic, environmental and social aspects are interacting. Once this has been achieved, the circles need to continuously rotate so that the different parts of each aspect are dynamic contact with all the issues in the other two aspects. This means that each part is inter-connected to others in the same and the other aspects (e.g. carbon emissions are connected with energy which in turn is connected to production, and so on). The further fusing of the
2 It should be noted that in many occasions the term development is used to indicate economic growth, even though they are inherently different. The former being improvements in well beings, quality of life and the environment, the latter being an increase in GNP/GDP. 3 I would like to thank Prof. Peattie for making me reflect upon this particular topic. The reflections have helped clarify many of my deep thoughts about the circles and helped me to arrive at an interesting way of ‘seeing’ their interactions.
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circles results in the First Tier Sustainability Equilibrium (FTSE), see Fig. 8. The second trajectory results from the concentric circles model. It should be noted that Hart [18] proposed progressing from the Venn diagram to the three concentric circles, but this shows little interaction among the aspects and no longitudinal perspective. This would indicate retrogression to a time in history where economic activities had little impact on society and the environment, one that does not represent the status of modern societies. It also does not differentiate about economic activities that improve the environment or society and those which reduce them. In this trajectory the economic aspects expand and inter-connect with the social subsystem, where the economic aspects are related to social ones (1CC ) and go beyond economic theories that disregard the effect of social aspects upon economic ones. In the graphical representation this is equivalent to enlarging the economic circle and spinning it continuously so that each of its parts is in contact with each of the social aspects (Fig. 9). An example of this is profits, which are not directly linked to personnel. Typically, in calculating profits, the different costs are subtracted from revenues. One of the costs is that of labour; a problem with this is that labour is just another part of the equation and disregards motivation, culture and human needs amongst others. In many cases employees are considered to be liabilities instead of assets [60]. Similarly, the social aspects, including the economic ones, expand and rotate in ways that interact with all dimensions of the natural environment. As a result each aspect is interrelated with every part of the other two aspects. In the representation this could be viewed as only one circle, which is composed the dynamic interactions of all three primary dimensions. This creates the First Tier Sustainability Equilibrium (FTSE), see Fig. 10. As discussed, the Venn and concentric circles representations lack the ability to show the dynamic time dimensions. They appear only as snapshots, not fully representing sustainability. To address this, the time perspective, also referred to as the inter-generational aspect [3], is incorporated, into the three spinning circles. This means moving from the integrational towards the inter-generational perspective. Fig. 11 shows an example of a prior attempt to show this perspective. However, this does not show the interrelatedness of each aspect with the others, as in the case of the Venn diagram. Another representation aiming to include the time perspective is offered by the Natural Step (TNS) framework [61], presented in Fig. 12. The framework works in four phases: the first phase, awareness, involves aligning around a common understanding of sustainability and the ‘whole-systems’ context. The second phase, baseline mapping, is designed to provide an analysis of today’s activities and how they relate to sustainability principles. The third
phase creates a vision of how a sustainable society would look like. From this vision a strategy and action plans can be developed. These are based on ‘‘backcasting’’ from principles. Phase 4 consists of advising and supporting the execution of specific initiatives by providing appropriate training, techniques, and tools for implementation, followed by measuring progress towards goals and suggesting modifications as needed [61,62]. The funnel provides a comprehensive framework on how to move towards Sustainable Societies through backcasting. However, as a representation, it does not portray the interactions of economic, environmental and social aspects. Furthermore, it implies that sustainability can be achieved, while as previously mentioned, it is an ideal dynamic state. A better way to graphically incorporate the time perspective is to project the FTSE with no deviation through time, which would be equivalent to ‘exploding’ it into the third dimension (3D-Sust), thus creating a perfect cylinder (Fig. 13). When there are deviations the 3D-Sust changes its shape from a cylinder to two types of cones. The first one is when too much emphasis is put on the present, e.g. using discounting methods, and little or no attention is given to the needs of tomorrow, then, instead of a cylinder, the shape takes the form of a cone with its wider side in the present (Fig. 14). In an extreme case this would make the 3D-Sust regress to the FTSE. The second is when too much emphasis is put on the future but limited emphasis is given to satisfying today’s needs, then the cone would have its wider base in the future. The final step involves the interactions of both equilibria into a Two Tiered Sustainability Equilibria (TTSE). This is achieved by inter-relating the FTSE in dynamic change processes through time, passing from the inter-generational to the holistic perspective. In this case the FTSE may not be the same today and in the future. In the TTSE all aspects including the time perspective interrelate, for example the economic aspects of today with the economic aspects of the future, but also with the environmental aspects of the present and the future, as well as with the social aspects of the present and the future. These interactions occur with all the other aspects of the present and the long-term, which make the cylinder suffer a metamorphosis into a doughnut shape by imploding in the direction of the time axis (Fig. 15), for this to occur time needs to bend. In the TTSE sustainability issues lie inside the doughnut and are in perennial movement inter-relating with other issues, continuously rotating in the two axes shown in the figure. This is aimed at helping to represent sustainability more clearly and completely. 4. Conclusions Modern ideologies that rely on short-term economic profits, and scientific traditions based on reductionistic cause–effect relationships are failing to explain and address the complex dynamic inter-
Fig. 15. Two Tiered Sustainability Equilibria (TTSE). Interactions between the First Tier Sustainability Equilibrium, i.e. among economic, environmental, and social aspects; and the Second Tier Sustainability Equilibrium, i.e. the short-, long- and longer-terms.
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relations among economic, environmental, and social aspects and the time perspective. The concepts of Sustainable Development (SD) and sustainability have appeared as alternatives to help to understand, address and reduce current, and potentially future, economic disparities, environmental degradation, and social ailments. However, these concepts are still unfamiliar to, or are misunderstood by many individuals and societies worldwide. In order to achieve real change it is necessary to facilitate greater awareness and understanding within and throughout societies. Although graphical representations, such as the Venn diagram, concentric circles, and the Sustainability Hexagon, can help the general public grasp the different aspects of SD and sustainability, they suffer from several drawbacks, such as the depiction of sustainability as a steady state, a lack of full integration and interrelatedness amongst the different aspects, and a lack of consideration of the dynamic time perspectives. These drawbacks have been recognised by a number of sustainability scholars, researchers and practitioners, who have challenged their accuracy and power to depict sustainability. This author proposes a new way of depicting sustainability, the Two Tiered Sustainability Equilibria (TTSE), where the issues in each aspect (economic, environmental and social), interact with each other, with issues in other aspects, and through time. The TTSE shows the complex inter-linkages and inter-relations between the First and Second Tier Sustainability Equilibria. It is hoped that the TTSE visual model will help people to more effectively understand that in order for us to achieve societal sustainability we must use holistic, continuous and interrelated phenomena amongst economic, environmental, and social aspects, and that each of our decisions has implications for all of the aspects today and in the future. This author welcomes your feedback and suggestions for further improvements. Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Miss Frances Hines, Prof. Don Huisingh, Prof. Francisco Lozano and Prof. Ken Peattie for their critiques and comments, and excellent recommendations for ways to improve this document. References [1] Carley M, Christie I. Managing sustainable development. 2nd ed. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd; 2000. p. 322. [2] Dalal-Clayton B, Bass S. Sustainable development strategies. 1st ed. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd; 2002. p. 358. [3] WCED. Our common future. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1987. [4] Korten DC. When corporations rule the world. 2nd ed. Bloomfield, Connecticut: Kumarian Press Inc.; 2001. [5] Cairns Jr J. Will the real sustainability concept please stand up? Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 2004:49–52. [6] Reid D. Sustainable development. An introductory guide. 1st ed. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd; 1995. p. 254. [7] Roorda N. AISHE: auditing instrument for sustainable higher education. Dutch Committee for Sustainable Higher Education; 2001. [8] Rosner WJ. Mental models for sustainability. Journal of Cleaner Production 1995;3(1–2):107–21. [9] Senge PM. The fifth discipline. The art & practice of the learning organization. London: Random House Business Books; 1999. [10] Dresner S. The principles of sustainability. 1st ed. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd; 2002. p. 200. [11] Kirkby J, O’Keefe P, Timberlake L. The Earthscan reader in sustainable development. 1st ed. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd; 1995. p. 371. [12] Atkinson G. Measuring corporate sustainability. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 2000;43(2):235–52. [13] Costanza R. Ecological economics. The science and management of sustainability. New York: Columbia University Press; 1991. p. 525. [14] Currie-Alder B. Barriers to sustainability: problems inhibiting the success of SANREM-Ecuador; 1997. [15] Dobers P, Wolff R. Competing with ‘soft’ issues – from managing the environment to sustainable business strategies. Business Strategy and the Environment 2000;9:143–50. [16] Doppelt B. Leading change toward sustainability. A change-management guide for business, government and civil society. Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing; 2003.
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