Romania durabila


 

Sustainable Society Index for Romania

Sustainability

Sustainability is very much in the spotlight nowadays. The mission of Al Gore and his film An Inconvenient Truth have much attributed to the present, widespread sense of urgency. However, that sense is mainly confined to climate change. But sustainability is much more than climate change, however dramatically climate change might affect our future. Few people have the same sense of urgency with respect to sustainability in its wider sense.

The notion of what is meant by sustainability differs strongly among people. For many people the basic idea of sustainability focuses greatly on depletion of resources. Others include in sustainability (irreversible) pollution, conservation of nature and other environmental and ecological aspects. And again others include the aspects of quality of human life, the human well-being. From an anthropocentric point of view sustainability comprises all three elements:

  1. depletion of resources »in order not to leave next generations empty-handed
  2. environmental and ecological aspects » in order to enable present and next generations to live in a clean and healthy environment, in harmony with nature
  3. quality of life » in order to ensure human well-being for present and next generations.
Sustainability without quality of life makes no sense and quality of life without sustainability has no perspective. All three elements are important for development towards a sustainable world. It is for this reason that IUCN, UNEP and WWF, already over fifteen years ago, defined sustainable development as ‘Improving the quality of life of humans while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems’.

And even a couple of years earlier the WCED, the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, published the well-known and worldwide respected definition of the Brundtland Commission. To make explicitly clear that sustainability includes all three elements mentioned above, the definition of Brundtland has been extended by adding a sentence so that the qualitative aspects of human life are explicitly included. We have formulated the Brundtland+ definition as follows:

A sustainable society is a society

  • that meets the needs of the present generation,
  • that does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,
  • and in which each human being has the opportunity to develop itself in freedom, within a well-balanced society and in harmony with its surroundings.

Based on this definition we have developed the Sustainable Society Index.

Website: Krekdesign, De Bilt, The Netherlands