Sustainability is the capacity to endure. In ecology, sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems. For humans, sustainability is the potential for long-term maintenance of well being, which has ecological, economic, political and cultural dimensions.
Janez Potočnik says: Investing in eco-innovation and green products will be very important to ensure Europe's global leadership in creating a resource efficient society. The Eco-innovation action plan put forward in December 2011 is a building block in this direction. It addresses obstacles, lock-in behavior, production systems, short term financing. It also offers models for policies to drive eco-innovation: public procurement of innovation, establishment of clusters and eco-parks, market replication or first application initiatives, and financing solutions tailored for innovative SMEs. The global market for green goods and services alone is estimated at €4.2 trillion. Our Communication "A Single Market for Green Products" and our work on eco-design are policy initiatives to support this. http://themostsearched.blogspot.gr/2013/10/europes-global-leadership-in-creating.html
The 3Es
Sustainability requires the reconciliation of environmental, social equity, and economic demands, also referred to as the three pillars of sustainability or (the 3Es).
Healthy ecosystems and environments are necessary to the survival and flourishing of humans and other organisms. There are a number of major ways of reducing negative human impact.
The first of these is environmental management. This approach is based largely on information gained from earth science, environmental science and conservation biology.
The second approach is management of human consumption of resources, which is based largely on information gained from economics.
A third more recent approach adds cultural and political concerns into the sustainability matrix.
Sustainability interfaces with economics through the social and environmental consequences of economic activity. Sustainability economics involves ecological economics where social aspects including cultural, health-related and monetary/financial aspects are integrated. Moving towards sustainability is also a social challenge that entails international and national law, urban planning and transport, local and individual lifestyles and ethical consumerism.
Ways of living more sustainably can take many forms from reorganizing living conditions (e.g., ecovillages, eco-municipalities and sustainable cities), reappraising economic sectors (permaculture, green building, sustainable agriculture), or work practices (sustainable architecture), using science to develop new technologies (green technologies, renewable energy and sustainable Fission and Fusion power), to adjustments in individual lifestyles that conserve natural resources.
Despite the increased popularity of the use of the term "sustainability", the possibility that human societies will achieve environmental sustainability has been, and continues to be, questioned—in light of environmental degradation, climate change, overconsumption, and societies' pursuit of indefinite economic growth in a closed system.
High Prices of Green Products
Green products are in vogue. Consumers are increasingly interested in products that use resources more efficiently. But outside certain niches, consumers have resisted paying the high prices that these products usually require.
In order to profitably connect with environmental concerns, companies in the home improvement sector are beginning to reorient green products around the direct material benefits to consumers. They emphasize savings more than green credentials.
A Challenging Opportunity
The housing bust of recent years further dampened what was already a mature home-improvement market. With household formation and home construction slowed, companies in affluent countries are eager for any area of potential growth. On the face of it, sustainability offers a great deal of potential, but converting theory into commercial viability is difficult.
Like companies in many other industries, home improvement companies have worked on improving the sustainability of their products. They’ve developed new lines and features and explored emerging technologies. But the results of these efforts have so far proved largely disappointing.
Surveys of executives worldwide indicate that most companies have changed their business practices in order to boost sustainability. Yet only 40 percent of executives have figured out how to boost sustainability andmake a profit.
Similarly, surveys of consumers found that most were interested in buying green. But only 8 to 16 percent, by region, did so systematically, and these numbers have fallen with the global recession. High prices were cited as the major constraint in affluent countries, while in emerging markets, high prices ranked a close second to lack of availability. The vast majority of consumers just aren’t willing to pay extra for sustainability for its own sake.
Adding to the challenge is consumers’ confusion about what sustainablereally means. A variety of terms get bandied about: low impact, energy efficient, renewable resource, local, and fair labor. Other feel-good concepts, such as healthfulness and “artisan made,” get thrown into the conversation. The sustainability discussion can involve environmental, economic, and social resources. No wonder consumers are skeptical.
Breaking Through
Yet some companies in the home improvement sector are working on ways to make green profitable. The key, they have found, is to clarify and reposition the category of green products and services. Instead of sustainability for its own sake, companies need to offer concrete, direct-to-the-consumer benefits. A feel-good option must also become a rational consumer choice.
The first step is to pick one’s battles. Sustainability can be compelling only in certain cost-benefit contexts. Basic consumer interest in sustainability can help tip the decision balance toward buying green, but it can’t work by itself. Reducing carbon emissions, for example, is a worthy goal, but consumers are far more motivated to save on energy and water bills. Government regulations, subsidies, new technologies, and higher energy costs all work into the mix.
Just look at the success of the Energy Star program for household appliances in Europe and the U.S. Governments have mandated that manufacturers report the energy efficiency of their appliances and estimate consumers’ likely savings on utility bills. A model whose performance falls within a certain range can be called an Energy Star. In certain categories, the government or local energy utility grants rebates to consumers who have bought those models.
The program has encouraged manufacturers to give greater consideration to efficiency-boosting technologies such as reconfigured dishwasher drums that use less electricity at the cost of a longer cycle time. Energy Star appliances have also gained space in retail showrooms. Special markings on the appliances even promote conspicuous conservation, appealing to people inclined to show off their virtue to visitors to their homes.
As a result, consumers who never before would have paid attention to energy efficiency can easily include this appliance attribute as a buying criterion. Those who live in areas with rising electricity rates have had the greatest incentive to buy these appliances. The overall energy efficiency of household appliances has risen dramatically under the program.
Focusing Green Products on Consumers’ Concerns
In areas for which the cost-benefit ratios are favorable, companies still need to make the financial benefits easily understood by and relevant to consumers. That means focusing the products on what consumers care about and can relate to.
In most European Union markets, many of the programs for reducing household carbon emissions include subsidies for low-carbon energy generation (such as solar energy), subsidies for home insulation, and regulations that require the measurement and certification of the carbon emission status of houses for sale. In today’s regulatory environment, the carbon-reduction home-improvement market is likely to grow significantly, generating many billions of dollars of new spending.
In order for retailers to go after this opportunity, they will need to develop their sales packages in a number of areas.
Customizable Options. Retailers need to develop a customer-friendly menu of options to match the variety of housing structures, energy costs and subsidies, and customer preferences. These options should allow homeowners to customize their purchases according to their available time, money, appetite for risk, and underlying interest in sustainability. This approach will also help retail-sales teams understand and communicate product features and benefits.
Specific Savings Estimates. Furthermore, retailers will have to demonstrate that these home-improvement purchases would be rational investments with financial payback. For most households, even with subsidies, such investments are big purchases, amounting to thousands of euros. Retailers cannot guarantee actual savings in energy bills, but they can show how the improvements would raise a home’s ratings in the certification program for home sales, and they can explain the impact these changes would have on typical energy bills.
Convenient Installation. Price is not the only hurdle to conversion. Homeowners also weigh the inconveniences and risks of installation. Retailers need to establish a network of home surveyors and installers.
Long-Term Financing. A final barrier to sales in this market is the insufficient availability of financing for homeowners. Because of the long time between purchase and payback, new consumer lending products are needed to fund these projects.
As these markets develop and well-prepared retailers increase their share in them, product costs can fall rapidly. In Germany, for example, a better organized and more efficient solar-panel distribution chain led to prices falling 30 percent from 2004 through 2006, and another 30 percent from 2006 through 2009. The installed base of solar-panel capacity more than quadrupled as consumers reacted to the lower prices.
Timing the Market
Because these products and services are expensive and complex, manufacturers and distributors should proceed carefully. They should look carefully at the three key drivers in the marketplace: government requirements and incentives, local energy and water costs, and underlying consumer interest.
The importance of each driver varies a great deal by location. European countries, for example, are promising markets for energy, while Australia may be a leader in efforts to conserve water.
The drivers are evolving and their importance can change fast—moving in either direction. Concerns about sustainability have certainly increased in recent years. Yet the global recession has led many governments to pull back on sustainability initiatives.
A wait-and-see strategy, however, has risks as well. Aggressive, well-prepared first movers in this category can establish distribution networks, set standards for product packages, refine their selling and service models, and learn about household needs. Rivals would then have a harder time getting consumer acceptance for what they bring to the table. If a pioneering strategy seems too risky, companies should consider preparing now to jump in as fast followers.
Companies will also have to balance sustainability programs with other opportunities. Expanding into developing countries is on everyone’s agenda, but expansion carries its own risks and complexities. In many sectors, the sustainability market represents one of the few organic domestic large-scale growth plays.
Whether because of stakeholder pressure, public image, or executive conviction, most companies have embraced sustainability as a concept and are searching for a hard business rationale. By orienting their products around solid consumer benefits—admittedly a less inspiring mission than saving the planet—companies can drive the strategic and organizational responses needed to make these efforts profitable. And that’s the only way sustainability programs will themselves be sustainable.
Green Jobs
Politicians, activists, and green energy entrepreneurs promise they will revitalize the economy, banish unemployment, free the United States from dependency on foreign oil, and make us all happier, healthier, and richer. But only if, advocates quickly note, the federal government makes a big enough commitment — in the form of mandates, regulations, and subsidies.
It sounds too good to be true. And it is. The concrete results of following these policies will be a decline in living standards around the globe, including for the world’s poorest; changes in lifestyle that Americans do not want; and a weakening of the technological progress that market forces have delivered, preventing us from finding real solutions to the real problems we face.
Many of those lifestyle changes will come from suddenly spending far more on energy than we’d like. Green technologies mean diverting production from cheap sources, such as coal and oil, to more expensive, highly subsidized ones, like wind and solar. These price spikes won’t be limited to our electricity bills either. Anything that increases the price of energy will also increase the price of goods that use energy indirectly.
The better solution to improving America’s energy economy is to let the market work by putting power in the hands of consumers. But many environmental pressure groups don’t want to leave conservation to individuals, preferring government mandates to change energy use. In other words, green-job proponents know they’re pushing a bad product.
Rather than allow the market to expose the bad economics of green energy, they’d use the power of government to force expensive and unnecessary transformation. To a large extent the choice we face on greening the economy is whether we will continue to rely on people and firms responding to price signals received in the market, or whether we will supplant those signals with decisions made by politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. This latter strategy brings considerable risk.
When government chooses green technologies, it fails for three reasons:
First, governments are insulated from market signals.
Second, firms reorient away from producing quality, cost-efficient products and toward consuming government largesse.
Third, government decision makers are only responsible for what happens between now and the next election, meaning they are unlikely to take long-term costs into account.
Our current mix of energy technologies is deeply embedded within our society and our economy. We need to focus on how to improve the reliability and environmental impact of our energy system, not propose massive change. Rather than subsidies and regulation, governments can promote a more secure energy future by distributing information and setting standards.
Environmental Impact
A major driver of human impact on Earth systems is the destruction of biophysical resources, and especially, the Earth's ecosystems. The environmental impact of a community or of humankind as a whole depends both on population and impact per person, which in turn depends in complex ways on what resources are being used, whether or not those resources are renewable, and the scale of the human activity relative to the carrying capacity of the ecosystems involved. Careful resource management can be applied at many scales, from economic sectors like agriculture, manufacturing and industry, to work organizations, the consumption patterns of households and individuals and to the resource demands of individual goods and services.
One of the initial attempts to express human impact mathematically was developed in the 1970s and is called the IPAT formula. This formulation attempts to explain human consumption in terms of three components: population numbers, levels of consumption (which it terms affluence, although the usage is different), and impact per unit of resource use (which is termed technology, because this impact depends on the technology used). The equation is expressed:
I = P × A × T
Where: I = Environmental impact, P = Population, A = Affluence, T = Technology
At the global scale, scientific data now indicates that humans are living beyond the carrying capacity of planet Earth and that this cannot continue indefinitely. This scientific evidence comes from many sources but is presented in detail in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the planetary boundaries framework. An early detailed examination of global limits was published in the 1972 book Limits to Growth, which has prompted follow-up commentary and analysis. A 2012 review in Nature by 22 international researchers expressed concerns that the Earth may be "approaching a state shift" in its biosphere.
Ecological Footprint
The Ecological footprint measures human consumption in terms of the biologically productive land needed to provide the resources, and absorb the wastes of the average global citizen. In 2008 it required 2.7 global hectares per person, 30% more than the natural biological capacity of 2.1 global hectares (assuming no provision for other organisms). The resulting ecological deficit must be met from unsustainable extrasources and these are obtained in three ways: embedded in the goods and services of world trade; taken from the past (e.g. fossil fuels); or borrowed from the future as unsustainable resource usage (e.g. by over exploiting forests and fisheries).
It is necessary for countries to maintain an acceptable standard of living for their citizens while, at the same time, maintaining sustainable resource use. The general trend is for higher standards of living to become less sustainable. As always, population growth has a marked influence on levels of consumption and the efficiency of resource use. The sustainability goal is to raise the global standard of living without increasing the use of resources beyond globally sustainable levels; that is, to not exceed "one planet" consumption. Information generated by reports at the national, regional and city scales confirm the global trend towards societies that are becoming less sustainable over time.
Carbon Footprint
A carbon footprint has generally been defined as the total sets of greenhouse gas emissions caused by an organization, event, product or person. However, most people use a more practicable definition: A measure of the total amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions of a defined population, system or activity, considering all relevant sources, sinks and storage within the spatial and temporal boundary of the population, system or activity of interest. The carbon footprint is calculated as carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e).
The average U.S. household carbon footprint is 48 tons CO2e per year. The single largest source of emissions for the typical household is from driving (gasoline use). Transportation as a whole (driving, flying & small amount from public transit) is the largest overall category, followed by housing (electricity, natural gas, waste, construction) then food (mostly from red meat, dairy and seafood products, but also includes emissions from all other food), then goods followed lastly by services. The carbon footprint of U.S. households is about 5 times greater than the global average, which is approximately 10 tons CO2e per household per year.
QUESTIONS
How do the 3Es apply to your country?
How do the 3Es apply to USA?
Have you noticed any sustainability at your workplace?
Have you noticed any sustainability at your home?
Have you noticed any sustainability at your city?
What do you think of the green jobs?
What is your favorite efficiency-boosting technology?
What do you think of Europe's global leadership in creating a resource efficient society? http://themostsearched.blogspot.gr/2013/10/europes-global-leadership-in-creating.html
How could you reduce your ecological footprint?
How could you reduce your carbon footprint?
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