Sustainability used to be just about saving the planet. Today, it has morphed into an umbrella term for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Sustainability is defined as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’
It’s fairly broad and encompassing. But, why is it important?
Since the Industrial Revolution (circa 1850’s) the earth has undergone profound economic and technological development, altering the structure of society. These huge developments have led to a significant increase in the world’s population, and accordingly the resources needed to sustain life and economic growth.
Over the last 70 years, these demands have hugely accelerated, leading to a really rapid deterioration of natural resources to fuel our needs. The period has been called the Great Acceleration, and it’s a cause of concern because it’s showing that we’re living beyond the following planetary boundaries. By-passing these boundaries could cause abrupt or irreversible environmental changes.
But, what are these planetary boundaries?
Planetary Boundaries
Currently, we as humans use 1.7 planets worth of resources for the stuff that we ‘need’. Put another way, it means that it takes the earth one year and eight months to regenerate what we’ve consumed in a year. In simple terms, we’re consuming, more than we’re regenerating, which is not good for future generations. We’re not being sustainable.
To continue to thrive for generations to come, Johan Rockström alongside other scientists developed the Planetary Boundary model. They argue that transgressing limits in the following boundaries will cause irreversible environmental damage.
There are 9 planetary boundaries. And as of 2023, we’ve transgressed 6 of them. This means we’ve made unsustainable changes to our climate, land systems, and biosphere and others. The planetary boundaries we’ve transgressed are marked with asterisks (**).
🌎 Climate Change **
🌎 Biosphere Integrity **
🌎 Land System Change **
🌎 Freshwater Change **
🌎 Biogeochemical Flows **
🌎 Ocean Acidification
🌎 Atmospheric Aerosol Loading
🌎 Stratospheric Ozone Depletion
🌎 Novel Entities (Things humans have created such as plastics) **
You find out more about planetary boundaries and how they have changed over the years from the Stockholm Resilience Centre here.
So, why is that important and what does it mean for businesses?
Impact on Businesses
These changes have created a lot of instability, and if left unchecked will continue to make doing business as usual more and more difficult. Take for example, the increasing frequency of natural disasters, as shown by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Natural disasters will cause supply chain disruption, property damage, and resulting reputational damage to companies who are unable to fulfil customer needs, all of which affects the bottom line.
So, what should we be doing as businesses?
It makes sense to undertake business adaption, and mitigation, as well as resilience building measures to reduce the risk to businesses. Organizations that continue to sit on the sidelines will be badly handicapped relative to those that are devising strategies to reduce risk and find competitive advantage in a more volatile world.
But Sustainability goes beyond just environmental impact.
The Human Side of Sustainability
Whilst a lot of talk on sustainability focusses on environmental aspects, sustainability goes beyond the environment. It includes human aspects as well. The best way to show this is through the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were defined in 2012 at the UN Conference in Rio.
These goals call for action from nations, businesses and people to work collectively, across the globe, by undertaking initiatives to be able to reach these goals so that we have a sustainable planet. Beyond the environment, this includes working to improve human rights, achieve gender equality and eradicate poverty as well as others, as above.
In part, businesses have responded to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by rebranding their ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ initiatives (CSR) into ‘Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)’ or ‘Sustainability’ initiatives.
Whilst my work focusses on helping businesses operate more sustainably, it’s important to recognise that businesses cannot do this without both a supporting economic model that channels investment into ESG, nor without the political and regulatory change to drive organizations towards becoming better sustainable entities.
Here’s a grabbing video from National Geographic that summarises the impact that we’ve had on this planet on a relatively short amount of time.
It’s clear that the time to act is now.
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