Sustainability

Antoinette Fage-Butler

Related terms: planetary boundaries; sustainable development; sustainable development goals; culture, temporality, futures, wicked problem, narrative, normativity, representation, participation

Sustainability, which, broadly defined, describes conditions or processes that can be maintained indefinitely, is one of the key challenges of our time. It has been characterised in relation to “three pillars”: social, economic, and environmental (Purvis et al. 2019) that interact in various ways (European Environment Agency 2025). In this glossary entry, the concern is with one of these pillars only – environmental sustainability, which is used to refer to human behaviours (especially those pertaining to production, consumption, and extraction) relating to the environment.

During the last half-century, environmental sustainability has been considered a particularly urgent matter for global societies. In 1972, a study commissioned by the Club of Rome predicted that the finite natural resources of the Earth would impose limits to growth that could have rather sudden negative impacts on population growth and industrial output, but the study concluded that it was still “possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future” (Meadows et al. 1972, 24). Sustainability became mainstream in the 1980s, according to Purvis et al. (2019), and continued to gain attention as a matter of concern. For example, Orr (1992) asserted that unsustainability “is the first truly global crisis. It is also unprecedented in its sheer complexity” (19). Reflecting this perspective, Pryshlakivsky and Searcy (2013) have described unsustainability as a “wicked problem” – a value-sensitive problem that policymakers find particularly challenging due to its complex causes and effects and that needs to be addressed using input from different disciplines. Although sustainability has garnered increasing attention in recent decades, it has a much longer history: it can be seen as a timeless condition, a moral imperative to ensure that the needs of future generations are not hindered by the practices of the present, and to safeguard the preservation of the integrity of our natural environments.

Broadly speaking, one can say that the overarching concern of environmental sustainability is with maintaining balance in human/environmental relations to ensure that future human generations and other forms of life have the environmental resources and conditions they need to thrive. Research relating to environmental sustainability is informed by the traditions and practices of different disciplines. These include science disciplines such as environmental science, ecology, earth sciences, and engineering, as well as social science and humanities disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, economics, education, and communication, and is enriched by their distinct knowledge forms. This means that one of the challenges and opportunities facing sustainability researchers is developing a language and skillset needed to talk meaningfully across disciplinary boundaries. This entry, though short, may be a small step towards supporting interdisciplinary research as it highlights some of the prevailing ways used to describe sustainability associated with different disciplines and communities of practice.

Specifically, this glossary entry will unpack three ways of conceptualizing environmental sustainability that commonly appear not only in research contexts but also increasingly in the public sphere in line with greater coverage of sustainability by the media and the mainstreaming of sustainability as a concept (Litofcenko et al. 2023). These are associated with scientific knowledge of environmental sustainability, such as reflected in the planetary boundaries model; political approaches, for example, in the form of the sustainable development goals; and cultural approaches to sustainability, where focus is on values. I will also address the forms of temporality embedded in the three conceptualizations of sustainability, and what they signify as horizons for sustainable action.

The selection of only three approaches to environmental sustainability prompts the caveat that other approaches to sustainability will be absent in what follows. For these, readers are directed elsewhere – to journals such as Sustainability, Sustainability Science, Global Sustainability, and Nature Sustainability, and to edited volumes and monographs that explore the concept of sustainability (e.g., Caradonna 2018; Portney 2015; Thiele 2016).

As mentioned, one approach to conceptualizing environmental sustainability relates to scientific knowledge of the biophysical systems that regulate the health of the planet. These systems are currently under strain due to anthropogenic disruptions. Nine planetary boundaries (Rockström et al. 2024) associated with the biophysical systems that regulate planetary health have been identified: climate change, biosphere integrity, stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, biogeochemical flows, land-system change, freshwater use, atmospheric aerosol loading, and novel entities such as microplastics and synthetic chemicals. Currently, six of the nine planetary boundaries are estimated to have been transgressed, resulting in the conclusion that “Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity” (Richardson et al. 2023, 1).

For 20,000 years and until recently, the Earth had a remarkably stable climate, which facilitated the evolution and maintenance of a rich biodiversity. This was known as the Holocene epoch. It has been posited that we are living in a new geological era called the Anthropocene since at least the middle of the 20^th century (Crutzen & Stoermer 2021[2000]; Steffen et al. 2007), where humans are the dominant force of change, destabilizing the relative equilibrium that characterized the Holocene. Geologists have recently dismissed the Anthropocene as a geological category after years of debate (Witze 2024), but the concept remains influential.

The forms of temporality associated with the scientific approach to sustainability include both the long geological timescapes of the Holocene or Anthropocene as well as shorter (urgent) timeframes such as the IPCC climate goal of “GHG emissions reductions of 43% (34–60%) by 2030 and 84% (73–98%) in 2050 relative to modelled 2019 emission levels” (IPCC 2022, 329). According to Rockström et al. (2018), the current challenges to global sustainability precipitate the need to construct “new development narratives and paradigms that guide us towards a world in which human needs and aspirations are met within the safe operating space of a stable and resilient Earth system” (2). This call for new narratives highlights the need for interdisciplinary collaboration with environmental humanities scholars, among others.

Besides being characterized as a scientific issue, sustainability is also a political issue, requiring political leadership and legislation. Another way of conceiving sustainability is thus evident in theorizing relating to political goal-setting for a (typically) not-so-distant future. One example of this is Brundtland (1987), who defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (41). In this understanding, economic growth (to eradicate poverty) is deemed to be integral to achieving sustainability, though, as Susskind (2024) has pointed out, in practice, economic growth often happens at the expense of fair distribution. In any case, Brundtland’s (1987) thinking on sustainable development is evident in the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), six of which relate explicitly to environmental issues: clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, sustainable cities and communities, climate action, life below water, and life on land. The SDGs were intended to provide a “blueprint” (United Nations 2025) for achieving global sustainable action by 2030, where progress on the SDGs was evaluated with respect to explicit targets. Although the United Nations (2012) highlighted “the key role of all levels of government and legislative bodies in promoting sustainable development” (11), delivery on the SDGs has been insufficient. A meta-analysis conducted on the political impacts of the SDGs concluded that while some discursive effects were evident, “effects are often diffuse, and there is little evidence that goal-setting at the global level leads directly to political impacts in national or local politics” (Biermann et al. 2022, 795–796). Biermann et al. (2022) assert that more fundamental change is required to make the SDGs the ambitious catalysts for change that they were originally hoped to be.

The two approaches of scientific knowledge of sustainable planetary conditions and political goal-setting in the form of the SDGs have been brought together in discussion papers (Rockström et al. 2013), policy briefs (Stockholm Environment Institute 2022), and academic articles (Randers et al. 2019). This shows the application and relevance of the scientific understanding of sustainability in the political arena, illustrating that various conceptualizations and knowledge forms associated with sustainability are often in interplay.

A third way in which sustainability has been conceived is as a matter of cultural values. Here, achieving environmental sustainability is seen as contingent on the actualization of a profound cultural shift – a new paradigm or metanarrative (Björkman 2019). Key to achieving sustainability is thus addressing our systems of values or what Horlings (2015) calls “the inner dimension of sustainability” (163). Attuning ourselves to sustainable values can occur in many ways. For example, as western cultures of consumption have meant that sustainability has tended to become something of a blind spot, educational programmes dedicated to promoting cultures of sustainability for all ages could help to address this gap (Boudling 1990; Marouli 2021). Others working with fine art, design, sound or literature often consider how to elicit deeper, more meaningful connections between people and their environments (see, for example, Bo 2021; Hansen et al. 2024; Krause 2016; Stephan 2021). Yet another strand to the cultural paradigm of sustainability recommends dialogue and participation to ensure broad inclusion and engagement of different perspectives on sustainability (Branny et al. 2025). Permeating these various takes on cultural approaches to environmental sustainability is a focus on normativity, representation, and narratives. References to time in the cultural approach to sustainability are rather varied: from a focus on the present that can take the form of visceral experiences in art museums that help to deepen the museum visitors’ relationship with the planet, to imagined (desired or feared) futures, as in the case of climate fiction. Significantly, the cultural approach to sustainability extends beyond an anthropocentric preoccupation with human needs, values and ultimately, human survival, as it deems environmental sustainability to be a goal that is worth achieving in its own right because of the intrinsic value of planetary life and systems.

Demonstrating further the interconnections between the various conceptualizations of environmental sustainability, Rockström et al. (2023) have discussed justice-related planetary boundaries, while UNESCO Courier (2025) describes culture as being “at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals”.

To conclude, environmental sustainability is a polysemantic concept that has been explored within a wide range of disciplines and that travels between them. This glossary entry highlighted three prominent ways in which environmental sustainability is currently conceptualised. Resonances between the three were identified: notably, each acknowledged the urgency of the crisis of unsustainability and the concomitant need for substantive change to ensure sustainable action and protect all forms of planetary life and systems. This latter point on the crucial human aspect of purposeful change-making underlines the importance of the cultural approach to sustainability and the particular contributions of the environmental humanities.

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