Sustainability Flashcards
Sustainability
improving the quality of people’s lives while living within the capacities of supporting natural and human systems.
Steps for sustainability
- A community’s first step should be an assessment of its existing natural and built environment and economic and social systems. The assessment should be based on the latest professional and scientific knowledge of these systems capacities and their strategic interrelationships. This will help provide an understanding of the strengths, gaps, and obstacles to achieving a more sustainable future.
- The next step should be to identify the desired goals for the community.
- Finally, a community will need to create a set of actions or a plan to achieve those goals in a sustainable manner. Many communities are turning to sustainability plans or integrating sustainability into their comprehensive plans to serve as a “roadmap” for addressing and implementing sustainability actions.
- Communities should also consider whether strategic regional partnerships would be more effective than an isolated local initiative.
- Ultimately, when considering and applying principles of sustainability, the effects must be measured and weighed from a systems approach. This includes considering the effect of implementing or not implementing sustainable practices on the environment, social systems, the economy, and others. It also includes considering lifecycle costs of products or practices.
Livable Built Environment:
Ensure that all elements of the built environment, including land use, transportation, housing, energy, and infrastructure, work together to provide sustainable, green places for living, working, and recreation, with a high quality of life.
Harmony with Nature
Ensure that the contributions of natural resources to human well- being are explicitly recognized and valued and that maintaining their health is a primary objective.
Resilient Economy
Ensure that the community is prepared to deal with both positive and negative changes in its economic health and to initiate sustainable urban development and redevelopment strategies that foster green business growth and build reliance on local assets.
Interwoven Equity
Ensure fairness and equity in providing for the housing, services, health, safety, and livelihood needs of all citizens and groups.
Healthy Community
Ensure that public health needs are recognized and addressed through provisions for healthy foods, physical activity, access to recreation, health care, environmental justice, and safe neighborhoods.
Responsible Regionalism
Ensure that all local proposals account for, connect with, and support the plans of adjacent jurisdictions and the surrounding region.
triple bottom line
TBL as an accounting approach can be expanded to ensure that the key measures of sustainability, people/social equity and planet/environment, are as important as prosperity/profit.
Environmental bottom line, or natural capital bottom line
sustainable environmental practices. A TBL company endeavors to benefit the natural order as much as possible or at the least do no harm and minimize environmental impact. A TBL endeavor reduces its ecological footprint by, among other things, carefully managing its consumption of energy and non-renewables and reducing manufacturing waste as well as
rendering waste less toxic before disposing of it in a safe and legal manner. “Cradle to grave” is uppermost in the thoughts of TBL manufacturing businesses, which typically conduct a life cycle assessment of products to determine what the true environmental cost is from the growth and harvesting of raw materials to manufacture to distribution to eventual disposal by the end user.
Economic
economic value created by the organization after deducting the cost of all inputs, including the cost of the capital tied up. It therefore differs from traditional accounting definitions of profit. In the original concept, within a sustainability framework, the “profit” aspect needs to be seen as the real economic benefit enjoyed by the host society. It is the real economic impact the organization has on its economic environment. This is often confused to be limited to the internal profit made by a company or organization (which nevertheless remains an essential starting point for the computation). Therefore, an original TBL approach cannot be interpreted as simply traditional corporate accounting profit plus social and environmental impacts unless the “profits” of other entities are included as a social benefit.
Equity
people, social equity, or human capital bottom line pertains to fair and beneficial business practices toward labor and the community and region in which a corporation conducts its business. A TBL company conceives a reciprocal social structure in which the well-being of corporate, labor and other stakeholder interests are interdependent.
