...Critically asses the relevance of sustainability as a concept of understanding urban development Introduction Sustainability is the ability to maintain and retain a particular process in an existing system (Pieterse, 2004). The word sustainability has been used since in 1980s. Its application has been mainly on the human sustainability on earth, which has resulted in the term sustainability that forms part of the sustainable development concept. The term sustainable development means a kind of development that satisfies the requirement of the present generation without compromising the capability of the future generation to be able to meet their needs. There are three main sustainable development goals. These goals are also known as the pillars of sustainability. They include environmental protection, social development and economic development. These three pillars of sustainability have served on common grounds for several sustainability standards as well as certification systems in the past and even today. These three pillars can be illustrated in details as follows: 1. Environmental protection: this is the capability of an environment to provide a given environmental quality and also natural resource extraction rate indefinitely. 2. Social development: this is the capability of a social system like a country or an organization to function at a particular level of social well-being and in harmony. 3. Economic development: this is the indefinite capability of an...
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...HARD BUT MANDATORY TO BE IN BATTLE –CORPORATE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT Dr PP Singh-Director, C.T Group of Institutions Maqsudan Campus Jalandhar. Arora Gaurav Singh-Management Faculty, Lovely Professional University Jalandhar. Rohit Kapoor-MBA-International Buisness,Lovely Professional University Jlandhar. Abstract In the current Business environment we often come across some facts where corporate enterprises form strategy to meet the second biggest challenge after transforming its business into corporate. The mainstream of the literature on corporate sustainability follows the win–win paradigm, according to which economic, environmental and social sustainability aspects can be achieved simultaneously. Where making profit is one primary objective and challenge for any corporate on the other front dynamism in the business environment lays corporate to plan down certain strategies to sustain in the battle irrespective of the crest and troughs in the business. This paper examines various strategies adopted by the companies to sustain ie- Corporate and social responsibility, stake holders management relations, environment management or it also the cost cutting part to be on the kitty to maintain the balance of revenues. The paper also highlights the manipulation of figures by the companies to be the arena. Introduction Corporate sustainable development means a formulation of Business strategy that puts the...
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...ecosystem for the sustainable development of mankind: a system dynamics perspective B. GIRIDHAR KAMATH, VASANTH VASUDEVA PANDUBETTU KAMATH, LEWLYN L.R RODRIGUES Department of Humanities and Management, Manipal University, Manipal, Karnataka, India Email: giridharbk@yahoo.com, kamath.vasanth@manipal.edu, rodrigusr@gmail.com Abstract: Human beings depend on the ecosystems for material and energy sources. Human-ecosystem interaction is closely related with the growing demands placed by people on ecosystems. Human activities have always had an impact on the ecosystem as a whole and over a period of time, this has had an irreversible impact on the ecosystem and the imbalance caused in the ecosystem have started to take its toll on the flora and fauna. The challenge now ahead of mankind is to focus on sustainable development and fight against issues like global warming and delayed rainfalls. Both the renewable and nonrenewable resources are under the threat of depletion. Issues like growing human population, deforestation, acute fuel shortage, and food production crisis drives our attention to sustainable development. The concept of sustainable development is making rounds ever since its inception in 1987. This paper proposes to build a conceptual model that relates social system and ecosystem with social, economic and environmental factors so as to build a System Dynamics model highlighting sustainable development. Keywords: Social Sustainability, Ecological Sustainability, Economic Sustainability...
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...Semester 1, 2012 Week 9: Innovation II Product Innovation Dr Gary Buttriss 9.1 What is a product-service system? What may be the impact on its own sustainability of a corporation currently providing products moving towards a product-service system? (See especially reading 9.1.) Answer • What is a product-service system • “A marketable set of products and services capable of jointly fulfilling a user‟s need. The product/service ratio in this set can vary, either in terms of function fulfillment or economic value. (p.238) • Also a system of products, services, supporting networks and infrastructure designed to be competitive, satisfy customer needs and have a lower environmental impact than traditional business models (p. 239) • Impacts on sustainability of a corporation • Drivers: Can provide access to new strategic markets opportunities, market trends and developments and potentially stay competitive as patterns of production and consumption are transformed. • Barriers: Fundamental cultural shifts are required. Markets and products may be hard to develop, consumers may resist. MGMT2001 - Corporate Sustainability 2 Context and Characteristics • Blurring of manufacturing and service: The role of services in providing value is ever more important. Added value is created by technological improvments, intellectual property, product image and brand names, aesthetic design and styling that differentiate and diversify products. Functional economy: Function...
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...TASTE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT THROUGH CSR ____________________________________________________ INTRODUCTION Sustainable development is a vision and a way of thinking and acting so that we can secure the resources and environment for our future generation. It will not be brought through policies only - it must be taken up by society as a principle guiding the many choices each citizen makes every day, as well as the big political and economic decisions that affect many. It is clear that environmental degradation tends to impose the largest costs on those generations that are yet to be born. We can only improve sustainable development when it will put an emphasis on involving citizens and stakeholders. Ultimately, the vision will become reality only if everybody contributes to a world where economic freedom, social justice and environmental protection go hand in hand, making our own and future generations better off than now.1 Sustainability has emerged as a challenge before entire civilization. The challenge before us is to reduce disparity through capacity building and providing poor and dispossessed access to the knowledge and resources needed for meaningful life. National Development through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Sustainability ensures the well-being of individual by integrating business practices in an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable manner that is transparent and ethical. CSR is...
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...facing and more companies are pressured to embrace sustainability as business conditions change. However, only recently corporations started integrating sustainability as the part of their business strategy as they came to recognize that it is an essential part in growing and establishing themselves as the leader in the competing environment. A well-executed sustainability strategy can enhance the company’s value and reinforce competitive advantage in the market while protecting the capital base. The balance of power has shifted between corporations and it is important to balance economic prosperity along with environmental and social dimensions. Sustainable business strategy represents a marked shift in traditional business practices and companies who do not adapt to the changes in these practices in order to achieve sustainable profitability will be more likely to face the brand value decline or even extinction in the future. For instance, the change represents the need to understand how all three dimensions affect each other and companies ought to consciously create new consumer preferences. However, a lot of companies still are missing guidelines to implementing a marketing strategy of sustainability as an essential part, which is at the core of ensuring organizational, social, economic and environment growth while managing overconsumption issues (White, 2011). Current researches tend to focus on developing a more sustainable approach on product design, pricing, promotion and...
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...Fairtrade: A form of sustainability marketing Fair trade developed rapidly and the movement is especially popular in the UK, although fair trade was not predicted such a potential future in 1980s. Paull(2011, p.317) reports there are 500 Fairtrade towns, 118 universities, over 6,000 churches, and over 4,000 UK schools registered in the Fairtrade Schools Scheme. Over 1.2 million farmers and workers in more than 60 countries participated in Fair Trade. In this essay it is proposed that fair trade is a form of sustainability marketing. It will first consider there are many similar key facets between fair trade and sustainability marketing. It will then go on to describe that both fair trade minimum price and fair trade premium promote sustainable development. The third part is about securing the rights of workers for paying attention to special sustainability issues. The forth part is about the invisible sustainability relationship between products and costumes. Then I analyze a successful fair trade company towards a sustainable way. Fair trade reflects many key facets of sustainability marketing. On the one hand, according to Belz and Peattie(2010, p.4), sustainability marketing means not only focusing on sustainable development but also considering the sustainability issues. To put it simply, sustainability marketing management aims to meet consumers’ wants and needs, while concerning social conditions and natural environment. On the other hand, fair trade is about better...
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...Executive summary This report seeks to define Environmental sustainability and examine its importance in the contemporary world of corporate dominance in the world arena. Business activities are regularly having an increasing contribution to environmental problems and threatening sustainability. Phenomena like climate change and extreme weather events have evidenced the effects of relentless use and overuse of natural resources. The need for environmental sustainability has become important now more than ever following the occurrence of repeated natural disasters and studies showing the ill effects on human health. It has been established that the misuse of natural resources can threaten the existence of future generations. The role of businesses, civil society and governments has been discussed in the context of environmental sustainability in this report with focus on climate change. The oil and gas sector is an important sector in terms of sustainability related to the environment. The sector has been scrutinized widely for occurrences like leakages and oil spills. The companies in this sector have a huge impact on the environment. The importance of oil companies in the path to sustainable development has been discussed. The multinational giants British Petroleum and ExxonMobil have been used as case studies to understand the kind of initiatives being taken in this sector for a sustainable environment. Lastly, the challenges related to the sector in implementing these initiatives...
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...Sustainable tourism is one of the pre-requisites of achieving sustainable development. the concept of tourism with sustainability and development gets its historical inclusion from mass tourism that got flourished in 1960s due to advent of jet aircraft and the passions for tourism got tremendous following and it also reached Third World countries (Dann, 2002). It was also argued that this boost pushed organizations like World Bank and UN to examine the cost benefit analysis of tourism and it was acknowledged that potential costs of tourism are far lower than financial benefits in shape of balance pf payment surpluses, infrastructure development, and employment and foreign exchange gains. So that gave rise to the concept of sustainable tourism as one of the source of bringing sustainable development. According to the World’s Summit on Sustainable Development (2002), it is claimed that Tourism is the world’s largest industry where in 2000, 698 million people travelled internationally which 7.3 % more than 1999. Similarly the economic worth of international tourism was US$477.9 billion in 2000 (Papers4you.com, 2006). In terms of one concrete definition, literature suggests that it is not fixed and is ever evolving. However Coccossis (1996) asserts that sustainable tourism can be taken in four different interpretations that include” economic sustainability of tourism”, the “ecologically sustainable tourism”,” sustainable tourism development” with both focus of environment as...
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...Sustainability Course Project Kathy Neihardt Sustainability 1. What is Sustainability? 2. Can our Society Endure? 3. What is a Sustainable Business? 4. World’s Most Sustainable Companies 5. Corporate Sustainability 6. What is the EPA Doing? 7. What is Sustainable Management? Sustainability Sustainability “creates and maintains the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony that permits fulfilling the social, economic and other requirements of present and future generations” (EPA, 2015). Sustainability is also “important to making sure that we have and will continue to have the water, materials and resources to protect human health and our environment” (EPA, 2015). Sustainability What is Sustainability? Sustainability is “everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends on our natural environment, we need to create and maintain the conditions under which nature can exist in productive harmony to support present and future generations” (U.S. EPA, 2015). Can our Society Endure? According to SustainAbility “today it is by no means certain our society has the capacity to endure, not in such a way the nine billion people expected on Earth by 2050 will be able to achieve a basic quality of life. The planet’s ecosystems are deteriorating and the climate is changing. We are consuming so much and so quickly that we are already living far beyond...
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...INTRODUCTION Education for Sustainable Development(ESD) allows every human being to gain the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values necessary to build a sustainable future. Education for Sustainable Development means including key sustainable development issues into teaching and learning, for example climate change, disaster risk reduction, biodiversity, poverty reduction, and sustainable consumption. It also requires teaching and learning methods that can motivate and encourage learners to change their behaviour and concern for sustainable development. Education for Sustainable Development also promotes competencies like critical thinking, imagining future scenarios and making decisions in a collaborative way. Sustainability education (ES), Education for Sustainability (EfS), and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) are interchangeable terms describing the practice of teaching for sustainability. Various approaches to ESD encourage people to understand the complexity, and synergies between, the issues threatening planetary sustainability and understand and assess their own values and those of the society who live in the context of sustainability. ESD seeks to involve people in sustainable future negotiation, decision making and acting on them. It is generally agreed that sustainability education must be customized for individual learners, according to Tilbury and Wortman, the following skills are essential to ESD. Envisioning – being able to imagine a better...
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...Sustainability from an economic perspective Introduction In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development tried to resolve the problem that lies in contradictions between environment and economical goals; the result was formed in definition of sustainable development: ‘Sustainable development is development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (Smith & Rees 1998, p. 15). Since that long time ago 1987, there have been a lot of researches in this field, and three essential aspects of sustainable development have been defined (Kronenberg & Bergier 2012, p. 24). At first, there is economic – a sustainable system must be able to produce goods and services on a permanent basis, to maintain appropriate levels of debt (government as well as external one), and to avoid significant disbalance in different sectors (that can damage agricultural or industrial production). Second one is environmental aspect – a sustainable system must maintain a stable resource base, avoid over-exploitation of renewable resources, and exhausting nonrenewable resources only if adequate substitutes exist. The last aspect is social one - a sustainable system must characterized by fair distribution and opportunity for everybody, provision of social services (like health, education, etc.) on the adequate level, gender equity, and political accountability and participation (Hofkes 1996, p. 342).These three aspects of sustainability...
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...MDG- Environmental Sustainability Article- Governing for Sustainability Governance in simple terms means “the process of decision making and the process by which decisions are implemented.” As governance pertains to the process of decision making and the process by which decisions are implemented, an analysis of governance focuses on formal and informal mechanisms that are set in place to manage social, political and economic relationships. Governance therefore encompasses complex systems structured as hierarchies with centralized and structured chain of communications with collective decision making. One truism that can be drawn from governance is that it is differs from place to place and system to system. Good governance usually is based on some characteristics like it is consensus oriented, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient, allows specialization. It is responsive to the present and future needs of the society. Environmental sustainability involves making decisions and taking actions that are in the interest of protecting the natural world with emphasis on preserving the capability of the environment. Environmental sustainability is not just about reducing the amount of waste or using less energy, but it’s concerned with developing processes that will lead to a sustainable future. Many cities are responsible for polluting the environment in ways that are not sustainable. Environmental sustainability forces people to look beyond short term gains and look...
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...(2008), efforts have been made at universities, in organizations, in governmental educational bodies, at international conferences to address sustainable issues. Government and media actively engage in debate on a number of environmental issues and consumers around the world more alert and increases their ecological awareness and concern (Felita & Yelena, 2013). However, the interminable discussion of the definition of ‘sustainability’ and its misconceptions is daunting and the concepts not readily understood even by many of the academics fostering the debate (Filho, 2000). The environment has primacy in this take on sustainability, and that has been our traditional approach. However, by touching sustainability’s...
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...'Club of Economics in Miskolc' TMP Vol. 8., Nr. 2., pp. 23-30. 2012. Green Accounting for Corporate Sustainability BETTINA HÓDI HERNÁDI ASSISTANT LECTURER e-mail: vgtbetti@uni-miskolc.hu SUMMARY Today, corporate sustainability is one of the greatest challenges facing companies. Therefore, this study aims to show how accounting, as the language of business and the source of information, can meet the criteria of sustainability. This article starts out by analysing the different approaches to corporate sustainability, then it proposes the reinterpretation of the most important accounting principle, the ‘going concern’ principle. In the following section it outlines the characteristics of accounting from the point of view of sustainability. Finally, it proposes ways of transforming green accounting, both in name and content, into sustainability accounting. Keywords: corporate sustainability; the ‘going concern’ principle; green accounting (environmental accounting); sustainability accounting Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) code: M41 INTRODUCTION According to the Brundtland Commission (1987, p. 43), “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of present generations without compromising the similar needs of future generations. The concept interprets sustainable economic, ecological and social development as a unity.” Today’s companies must also comply with the challenges stemming from this approach, and therefore they must also implement economic,...
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