Sustainability models

There are 3 types of sustainability generally spoken about:

1. environmental
2. social
3. economic

Sustainability” refers to something specific and critically important… our long-term cultural, economic, and environmental health and vitality.  It links these issues together rather than thinking of them as separate.

To achieve sustainability, coordination across social, cultural, economic, and environmental areas is required. That cooperation, coordination, recognition, is not necessarily present, nor perhaps possible, in government thinking, policy or practice. That may be identified as one of the barriers to achieving sustainability.
Many decision makers view the three strands of sustainability (economic social and environmental) as separate entities which we need to look after. In this view, the three spheres as per the models below wouldn’t overlap at all.

This ideology as eveloved with decision makers more in tune with our sustainability needs to overlapping spheres in what is sometimes described as the “weak” model.

A better model is called the “strong” model. It places us as lords of the economy…not victims of it. And both society and the economy are recognized to lie within the bounds of the planet’s limits. In the other models, it’s not obvious that depletion of the environment results in decrease of society (population) and the economy.

Go to earlier posts on (un)sustainability models by clicking on either of the pictures below:
Sustainable System		Unsustainable System

More related links

1. http://eyeon2050sustheory.blogspot.com/2008/05/in-their-1987-report-to-united-nations.html
2. http://www.eyeon2050.com/2008/05/two-models.html
3. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2006/05/23091323/4

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