Claiming Sustainability: Requirements and Challenges

Despite the strong desire to find solutions that enable sustainable development, understanding of the requirements that methods must satisfy to guide technological development toward sustainability is still quite limited. We address this challenge based on a meta-principle for sustainability: human activities should not exceed critical ecosystem capacity, and by translating this principle into six specific requirements that sustainability assessment methods should satisfy. These necessary but not sufficient requirements are to ensure that decisions made by these methods do not demand more from ecosystems than can be supplied, and actions meant to reduce environmental impact do not shift the problem outside the system boundary. By applying these requirements to existing methods, we identify their benefits and shortcomings, and use this insight to suggest a multidisciplinary path forward. This path requires integration of methods for engineering design, with methods for considering spatial effects, socio-economic interactions, and human-natural system interactions. Such integration poses challenges and opportunities for multidisciplinary research toward solutions for sustainable development.