Sustainability

Abstract

The concept of sustainability, like the related concept of sustainable development, has come to be used in multiple ways. This results from the endorsement of sustainable development, in the face of global environmental problems and problems of poverty and underdevelopment, by the World Commission on Environment and Development in the Brundtland Report and its subsequent adoption by over 180 countries at the Rio Summit in 1992. Governments, corporations, their advisors, and think‐tanks then had strong incentives to reinterpret or redefine this policy to which all were by now committed; hence the multiple and divergent uses of “sustainability.” Yet addressing the original problems remains more crucial than ever.