Abstract
In the last years, the concepts of sustainable development and environmental sustainability entered in the international political agenda. By these expressions, we mean the systemic conditions according to which, at a regional and global level, social and production development occurs.
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Notes
- 1.
The resilience of an ecosystem is its capacity to undergo a disruptive action without irreversibly quitting its equilibrium. This concept, extended to the whole planet, introduces the idea that the natural system the human activities are founded upon has some resilience limits, beyond which irreversible degradation phenomena start.
- 2.
The natural capital is the set of non-renewable resources and of the systemic capacities of the environment to reproduce renewable resources. The term also refers to the genetic richness, i.e. the variety of the species living on the planet.
- 3.
The environmental space is the quantity of energy, water, soil, non-renewable materials that can be used in a sustainable way. It indicates how much environment a person, a nation or a continent are endowed with to live, to produce and to consume without trespassing the sustainability limits.
- 4.
In London, in December 1952, thousands of people died because of the winter smog, called ‘the London smoke’. The term was coined in that period joining the words smo(ke) and (fo)g.
- 5.
Meadows et al. (1972).
- 6.
World Commission for Environment and Development (1987), Our Common Future.
- 7.
Geyer-Allely E. (January–March 2002).
- 8.
UNO (2002), Johannesburg Declaration on sustainable development.
- 9.
EU (2009).
- 10.
Cf. IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report, www.ipcc.ch/index.htm.
- 11.
Cf. UN (2000).
- 12.
Cf. The entire document at http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/70/1&Lang=E.
- 13.
- 14.
The environmental effects are then described in detail in Chap. 13, Part III, Environmental Impact of the Products and its Assessment: Life Cycle Assessment and in the schemes contained in Appendix B.
- 15.
Cf. World Bank (2015).
- 16.
International Energy Agency (2016) .
- 17.
Cf. the entire document on www.undemocracy.com/A-RES-55-2.pdf.
- 18.
Cf. World Bank (2000).
- 19.
Cf. FAO (2015).
- 20.
Cf. the Sustainable Development Strategy of the European Union of 2006, adopted and voted by the European Council.
- 21.
Cf. Chap. 2, Part I.
- 22.
About this topic, cf. the works of the Wuppertal Institut für Klima, Umwelt, Energie; of the Advisory Council for Research on Nature and Environment (in particular: The Ecocapacity as a challenge to technological development, a study funded by a group of Dutch ministries); of the Wolking group on eco-efficiency, that was promoted by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (in particular, cf. the Eco-efficient Leadership final report, 1996, WBCSD).
- 23.
Cf. UNEP (1993), ERL (1994a, b).
- 24.
The following terminology is used this way: low income is preferred to developing, medium income is preferred to emerging, and industrialised is preferred to developed, since these terms better mirror the objective characteristics, without value judgments. Moreover, it needs to be underlined that the production and consumption model in industrialised contexts is very far from being ‘developed’, since it is the model responsible for the majority of the harmful environmental impact. Contexts are preferred to countries because in different countries there may be different socio-economic contexts.
- 25.
Cf. Hart and Milstein (1999), Global sustainability and the creative destruction of industries, Sloan Management Review.
- 26.
For the Happy Planet Index, cf. www.happyplanetindex.org.
- 27.
Cf. the entire document at http://ec.europa.eu/environment/eussd/.
- 28.
Cf. the SCORE (Sustainable Consumption Research Exchange) project, supported by the 6th Framework Programme of the European Union, www.score-network.org.
- 29.
Cf. the full text at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2010:2020:FIN:EN:PDF.
- 30.
Cf. the full text at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2010:2020:FIN:EN:PDF.
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Vezzoli, C. (2018). Sustainability and Discontinuity. In: Design for Environmental Sustainability. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-7364-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-7364-9_1
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