Defining Sustainability
Sustainability is a complex concept which keeps changing and evolving similar to the development of design and business (Le Blanc 2015). Teams those are responsible for designing the innovation as well as developing them is trying to expand the provided definition of sustainability in order to introduce numerous strategies as well as amenities which help in promoting a better life for people. It also helps in improving the performances as well as operations of organizations. Most of the outcomes of advanced sustainability occur when human labor and technology are integrated. These two factors are supported with the help of designing various processes by combining analysis, benchmarking, modeling, alignment, research creative visioning, education and marketing (Kates 2018). This report discusses regarding various articles that have described about facts or processes that lead to sustainability of organizations. The steps adopted by the organizations in order to maintain a sustainable environment.
The main objective of this report is to examine the given case study on the basis of the concept of sustainability. It also highlights the critical factors related to the sustainability of environment. One more objective includes the speculation of current practices and examine how important or helpful they would be in long run.
Sustainability can be defined as the ability of any organization or even an individual to continue a specific behavior indefinitely. Some examples of these behavior include environmental sustainability which is defines as the capacity to maintain a particular rate of usage of non renewable resources and use the renewable ones more (Barkemeyer, Holt and Preuss 2014). These activities would reduce the level of carbon foot print, pollution. It also does not let non renewable resources to extinct and save it for future use. This can be done by an organization and an individual as well. It is not necessary that only big organizations can follow them and bring a change but an individual can also bring about little change in the environment. One more type of sustainability includes economic sustainability. The environment sustainability and economic sustainability are directly proportional to each other. Economic sustainability can be brought about if measures are taken for sustaining the environment (Carley and Christie 2017). Suppose the usage of renewable energy resources like sunlight, water energy and many more would help the organizations to contribute in economic sustainability as well. Reducing the usage of renewable resources would help in reducing the cost incurred in purchasing them as well. Social sustainability is also as a part of sustainability which can be defined as the capacity of the social system like country to act at a definite level of well being of society indefinitely. These are the main there pillars of sustainability.
Practices for Sustainable Development
The sustainability that has been defined above actually is against the provided norms of sustainability (Weaver, Jansen and Van 2017). Sustainability development can be defined as a development which ensures that the recent needs would be met without any compromise of the previous needs. The introduction of new needs and meeting them would not affect the previous ones. Both will be met with equal priority. It also does allow the compromise of the capacity of the future generations to meet the needs as well. Main key concepts of sustainable development include the concept of various needs (Charles, Schmidheiny and Watts 2017). These needs can be defined as the basic needs of people, this needs should be considered as the utmost priority because basic needs are the ones that needs to be met first and then comes other needs or wants (Charles, Schmidheiny and Watts 2017). The next key concept includes the ides of imposing limitations by the concept of technology as well as social organization on the ability of environment of meeting present as well as future needs.
The definitions of sustainability environment have numerous traps which do not prove them the best (Liu, Oza and Hogan 2016). The main problem is that which factor should be considered as the top priority.
- Is poverty more essential than environment sustainability: The main answer to this is that of the problem of environment sustainability is not solved, it is impossible to solve any other problem (Sachs 2015). This is because of the catastrophic collapse. If the problem of poverty is not solved then it would change the world. Poverty has been lasting since the existence of humans but in this case the problem of environment sustainability is very new and it has the ability to threat then existence of people or any other species on earth (Sachs 2015). This is the reason that the poverty does not deserve to be the extreme priority but the environment sustainability deserves to be the priority.
- Development in most of the countries is defined as their economic growth especially in the counties that are still developing (Clark, Tomich and Van Noordwijk 2016). They target in growing their revenue and not decrees the problem faced by the countrymen. This makes the problem of sustainability even worse because the economic system is always unsustainable. Development should mean the development in quality as well as quantity, this means that in order to be developed just increasing the revenue is not enough, along with that it should be noticed that the countrymen are leading a good life and not facing any major problem due to the whereabouts of the country (Clark, Tomich and Van Noordwijk 2016). Qualitative growth is very sustainable; whereas quantitative growth can never be sustainable once the limit is crossed.
- A commitment to the improvement: the commitment to improve can be referred to with the help of a quotation “What gets measured is what gets improved.” (Wheeler and Beatley 2014). This can be defined as among the main practice of any organization. If anything has to be changed, it should be committed first and then the activities performed to bring about the change should be measured or monitored. This would ensure that the process is going well. If measuring or monitoring is not done and no records are kept, there would not be any proof of the development (Wheeler and Beatley 2014). The monitoring or measuring would also help in identifying the areas that need improvement. It would help in finding out the loopholes in the procedure and find out ways to solve them.
- A commitment to the engagement: In a particular project of environment sustainability, the stakeholders involved in the company or project should be engaged (Bendell 2017). This is considers as the leading attributes in the process of attaining a successful program of sustainability. Organizations should also commit that a collective intelligence of various employees of their organization would be considered. This would provide a competitive advantage to the organization in the process of optimizing and indentifying the areas of sustainability (Nilsson, Griggs and Visbeck 2016). This would as a result provide best results and impacts to the organization. So this point depicts that commitment of engaging the stakeholders as well as employees would not only help the organization in attaining their goal of sustainability but also make them feel important and they would feel that the employees are valued like the stakeholders (Nilsson, Griggs and Visbeck 2016). Early as well as very deep engagement would help the organization in providing the energy and foundation the realization of the economic and environmental benefits of a particular sustainable program that is progressing. Improving the engagement of stakeholders would create more improvements on the sustainability (Nilsson, Griggs and Visbeck 2016). It would also ensure that the employees are involved in the process and continuously thinking about sustainability not only in their workplace but also their own life.
- Commitment to leverage: the sustainability of leverage in an organization’s supply chain in some areas like logistics, circular economy and eco design would help in creating a win solution across various factors like customer satisfaction, improving the efficiency of numerous operations, reduction of carbon footprint and reducing costs.
Practices for sustainable development have been adopted and is very common in numerous organizations. Adopting the measures for sustaining the environment helps the organizations to contribute in betterment of the environment (Welford 2016). Some present sustainable practices are as follows. Corporate companies provide enough efforts for integrating sustainability in their businesses. Attaining various factors of sustainability would not only help the organization in contributing their efforts towards the environment but it also improves their brand image in front of common people (Weber, Diaz and Schwegler 2014). Sustainability also helps the employees in the organization to lead a good life and implement the ways of sustainability in their personal lives as well.
Energy conservation: Various organizations have taken numerous measures in order to support energy conservation. Conservation of energies especially electricity acts as a major factor in sustainability of environment (Weber, Diaz and Schwegler 2014). Most of the organizations follow some policies that help them in conserving energy. For example it has been seen that after the working hours of a company all the electrical appliances still work or are kept on. This has been avoided by many (Weber, Diaz and Schwegler 2014). Organizations have tries taking efforts in conserving energy by conveying it to everyone that the electrical appliances should be switched off when the employees leave the room for some purposes or their working shift is over (Weber, Diaz and Schwegler 2014). One more important step taken by the organization is the adoption of solar panels for producing electricity and not any other sources. Solar energy is a renewable source of energy and it is unlimitedly available. As a result it is used by the organizations in conserving electricity (Holden, Linnerud and Banister 2017). Installing solar panels as a source of electricity is one of the newest methods and have proved to be contributing a lot in sustainability of environment. Though many organizations can not invest the capital for installation of solar panels because besides being very helpful, it is very expensive (Holden, Linnerud and Banister 2017). The installation of solar panels is mostly common in organizations; it is not very common in individual residents. This would help a lot in the upcoming future because it would reduce the usage of electricity and help in preserving it for other purposes. Though installing solar panels would not be possible by every resident in the city but conserving energy by using methods like switching of the electrical appliances like fan, lights and many more when not in use can be adopted.
Alternative transportation: Alternative transportation means the usage of other means of transportation instead of personal vehicles (Hák, Janoušková and Moldan 2016). Many organizations have taken the step of providing their employees the facility of pick up and drop. This is applicable for almost all the employees except the ones that live very near to the organization (Hák, Janoušková and Moldan 2016). This helps the organization as well as employees to contribute in reducing the usage of fuels and creating air pollution. If all the employees of an organization travel through different means of transportation it would consume more fuel and cause air pollution (Hák, Janoušková and Moldan 2016). In order to reduce this, car pool system has been introduced which helps people to travel to their destination by using public transport.
From the above report it can be discussed that there are various critical issues that organizations face during the sustainability. These factors are required to tackle in a proper way and adopt measures that provide benefits more than headaches. This report also discusses regarding the practices that are adopted by most of the organizations weather governmental or nongovernmental. These measures have been proved to be helpful not only in the present but also in long run. The sustainability of environment by measures such as energy conservation, recycling and many more would help in conserving the non renewable energy resources for the upcoming generation.
References
Barkemeyer, R., Holt, D., Preuss, L. and Tsang, S., 2014. What happened to the development’in sustainable development? Business guidelines two decades after Brundtland. sustainable development, 22(1), pp.15-32.
Bendell, J., 2017. Terms for endearment: Business, NGOs and sustainable development. Routledge.
Carley, M. and Christie, I., 2017. Managing sustainable development. Routledge.
Charles Jr, O.H., Schmidheiny, S. and Watts, P., 2017. Walking the talk: The business case for sustainable development. Routledge.
Clark, W.C., Tomich, T.P., Van Noordwijk, M., Guston, D., Catacutan, D., Dickson, N.M. and McNie, E., 2016. Boundary work for sustainable development: Natural resource management at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(17), pp.4615-4622.
Hák, T., Janoušková, S. and Moldan, B., 2016. Sustainable Development Goals: A need for relevant indicators. Ecological Indicators, 60, pp.565-573.
Holden, E., Linnerud, K., Banister, D., Schwanitz, V.J. and Wierling, A., 2017. The Imperatives of Sustainable Development: Needs, Justice, Limits. Routledge.
Kates, R.W., 2018. What is sustainable development?.
Le Blanc, D., 2015. Towards integration at last? The sustainable development goals as a network of targets. Sustainable Development, 23(3), pp.176-187.
Liu, L., Oza, S., Hogan, D., Chu, Y., Perin, J., Zhu, J., Lawn, J.E., Cousens, S., Mathers, C. and Black, R.E., 2016. Global, regional, and national causes of under-5 mortality in 2000–15: an updated systematic analysis with implications for the Sustainable Development Goals. The Lancet, 388(10063), pp.3027-3035.
Nilsson, M., Griggs, D. and Visbeck, M., 2016. Policy: map the interactions between Sustainable Development Goals. Nature News, 534(7607), p.320.
Sachs, J.D., 2015. The age of sustainable development. Columbia University Press.
Weaver, P., Jansen, L., Van Grootveld, G., Van Spiegel, E. and Vergragt, P., 2017. Sustainable technology development. Routledge.
Weber, O., Diaz, M. and Schwegler, R., 2014. Corporate social responsibility of the financial sector–Strengths, weaknesses and the impact on sustainable development. Sustainable Development, 22(5), pp.321-335.
Welford, R., 2016. Corporate environmental management 3: Towards sustainable development. Routledge.
Wheeler, S.M. and Beatley, T. eds., 2014. Sustainable urban development reader. Routledge.
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