Untangling Sustainability

One of the things we see at Aclymate is an ongoing conflation of sustainability and climate in business. While climate is a component of sustainability, sustainability is a lot more. And I’d challenge you to define it.

You’d probably start with the dictionary definition of sustainable, which talks about “..a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged.” I guess that’s clear enough, though it doesn’t give much guidance towards the work a business should do. Going to the longer encyclopedia definition, the problem gets murkier, as sustainability is applied to all nature of issues from international development, to human resources, and to the environment. The deeper you dig, the more complex it becomes – a 2018 paper in Sustainability Science on the subject found that definitions were not standardized and led to confusion.

This isn’t malicious – the need for sustainability emerged from a broad understanding that business needed to change to include a broader list of stakeholders and, as such, was a concept born of necessity by many parents. It also reflects the nature of the problem - sustainability is at its core a systems problem brought about by systems thinkers. It’s been important intellectual work.

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