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Tourism research must recognise recent advances in sustainability theory if it is to progress conceptually and in the policy domain. By applying the method of critical review, this paper demonstrates the relevance of the capitals approach to sustainable tourism development, with human well-being identified as the ultimate objective of the process. Distinguishing between weak and strong sustainability, a policy framework is developed to merge the capitals approach with well-being outcomes to determine the direct and indirect benefits of tourism developments to stakeholders and destination residents. Several challenges must be addressed if sustainability principles and practices are to be embedded in tourism policymaking.

This paper reviews and evaluates the sustainability of oil palm plantations in Malaysia, encompassing the aspects of environmental, social and economic performances. It also provides recommendations for improving the sustainability of the plantations. The review involves examination of the existing literature and reports in the genres of environmental, social and economic sustainability of oil palm plantations, where environmental sustainability is further divided into the themes of biodiversity, deforestation, environmental pollution and peatland conversion. The outcomes of the review are then evaluated using the popular models of weak and strong sustainability. Recommendations for sustainable practices of the oil palm sector at planning, policy-making and implementation levels are also made. The review shows that oil palm plantations have lower biodiversity compared to logged over forests and are not solely to be blamed for deforestation in Malaysia, particularly before 1985 during which logging was active. The expansion of oil palm plantations has nonetheless caused environmental pollution and catalyzed the conversion of peatlands. Socially, while benefiting smallholders by improving their incomes, oil palm plantations have drawn in large number of foreign workers and this potentially gives rise to the issues of welfare, human right, equity and demographic change. Oil palms have significantly contributed to the Malaysian economy and are highly productive. Biodiversity and environmental management, sustainability certification, increased social corporate responsibility and review of employment policy are perceived to be beneficial for oil palm sustainability.

The implementation of bioeconomy is important in seeking to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Thus, in recent years, more attention is focused on sustainable bioeconomy. Referring to weak and strong sustainability approaches, many authors stated that bioeconomy is related only to weak sustainability, but this study provides a framework for policy makers that allows the definition and implementation of the bioeconomy based on the strong sustainability approach. Furthermore, researchers evaluating bioeconomy implementation conventionally encompassed the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of the impact of bio‐products; however, they did not consider the strong sustainability approach. Strong sustainability additionally requires not crossing ecological thresholds and, thus, implies consideration of planetary boundaries. Therefore, the inclusion of land footprint and biocapacity measures in the bioeconomy strategy, verifying that the land footprint does not exceed the level of biocapacity, is essential for the creation of a strongly sustainable bioeconomy. This study embarks on the definition of the bioeconomy based on strong sustainability and contributes to the discussion about bioeconomy implementation in the context of sustainable development.

The recent decades have witnessed an alarmingly phenomenal rise in population and economic growth, increasing the global resource demand and environmental degradation. The main objective of this study is to investigate the relationships between population, industrialization, affluence, technology, and sustainability. Approaching sustainability, a couple of viewpoints including weak and strong sustainability establish two different priorities, albeit with possibly the same factors as in the IPAT and STIRPAT models. This paper employs STIRPAT equation to estimate the relationships between population, industrialization, affluence, technology, and sustainability in MENA and OECD countries during 1975–2015. The results suggest that weak and strong sustainability, albeit slightly, is affected negatively by population and industrialization, and positively by technology and international agreements on environment, in MENA and OECD countries during 1975–2015. Therefore, the policy-makers in sustainability are advised to develop preventive and qualitative strategies for population and industrial activities, but inflationary ones for technology; besides the governments are suggested to confirm, join, and sign the international treaties on environmental conservation.

This study explores the relationship between a for-profit leisure program and sustainability issues in the context of a hollow village in China. We studied what forms of relation between leisure and sustainability could be identified through the operation of ‘Mount Qi and the hermit master’ at a hollow village, and to what extent, ‘Mount Qi and the hermit master’ can be considered as a sustainable leisure program. Fieldwork and focus groups were used to collect data. Theoretically, the analyses adopt a comprehensive model of sustainability, which integrates the concepts of weak and strong sustainability, as well as considers the sustainability of human needs. Our findings demonstrate that the leisure program has contributed to a comprehensive sustainable development and helped to meet the villagers’ needs. This study also critically points out the uncertain aspects relating to the sustainability of human needs at the current stage of the program implementation.

In contrast to conventional approaches the conceptualisation of sustainability as fair bequest makes it possible to consider a finite time horizon. Valuation is necessary to determine whether the bequest package that is passed on from one generation to the next is fair. Acknowledging the merits as well as the limitations of economic price theory, this paper differentiates between three classes of valuables: the essential, the useful and the unique. It is argued that a fair bequest package should contain items from each of the classes. Because the three classes are incommensurable, fairness of the bequest cannot be expressed by a single figure like a non-declining total value of the package. We then discuss which methods are appropriate for describing a bequest package with respect to its fairness.

In a context of expansion and development of the tourism sector worldwide, assessing the tourism sustainability performance of regions or countries becomes an important goal of strategic planning as a means to ensure an appropriate balance between present and future opportunities of areas with a tourism-based economy. Due to the multidimensional nature of the sustainability concept and the difficulties encountered in its measurement, composite indicators have increasingly been used as useful tools for the operationalization of sustainability. In this paper the study of tourism sustainability of Spanish regions is addressed by building a composite indicator that uses multicriteria decision techniques for the aggregation and weighting of the simple indicators considered. The developed index allows the representation of both the weak and strong sustainability paradigms, as well as other compromising, midway concepts between those. Moreover, the sustainability performance of the studied regions can be easily compared and a fair ranking of the regions can accordingly be obtained, which can serve as a starting point that stimulates public and private debate and promotes improvement actions to achieve sustainability.

This perspective paper aims to contribute to current discussions about responsible innovation and innovation systems for sustainability. The paper interrogates the purposes of innovation and its role in sustainable development. It reflects on the differences between adopting weak or strong sustainability as the final goal in terms of innovation and innovation systems. At a meta level, it aims to bring clarity to the use of concepts like innovation, technology or responsible innovation in relation to sustainability and sustainable development discussions. The paper concludes suggesting some areas for future research in the realm of innovation for sustainable development.

Many argue that the twin problems of poverty and environmental degradation are best addressed by adopting greater egalitarian processes of governance. Greater egalitarian societies apparently contain the required social trust and consensus for making hard choices and tradeoffs for achieving environmental gains. We employ novel data on egalitarian democracy, which measure the equal access of the poor to political power and societal resources, and data covering weak and strong sustainability measured by the “adjusted net savings” and several indicators of atmospheric pollution. The results suggest that greater egalitarian governance reduces weak sustainability and increases the intensity of climate-harming pollution. Regardless of democracy, other measures of social equity, such as the GINI and equal access to health and political resources, increase, not decrease, atmospheric pollution. These results are robust to estimating procedure, several alternative models, and data. While liberté, egalité and fraternité should be pursued for their own intrinsic value, meeting urgent challenges from global warming may require more targeted solutions.

With growing demand for mineral resources and favourable policy towards the mining sector, developing countries have become investment hubs for mineral extraction, which has changed the socioeconomic and ecological scenarios particularly in rural areas. Extractive industries such as coal mining generate negative externalities that bring irreversible changes in the local ecological conditions, which adversely affect the local economy and threatens the sustainability of local livelihood systems. The objective of this paper is to analyse the effects of coal mining on local traditional livelihood systems in the eastern Indian state of Odisha. The study is carried out using household level data collected from four mining villages located in the Ib valley coal field of Odisha. The problem of sustainability of local traditional livelihoods is examined in the light of economic theories of sustainability (e.g. weak and strong sustainability) and sustainable livelihood approach (SLA). The results show that rural households in the mining area experience both positive and negative outcomes from the coal mining activities. The expansion of mines has provided employment to locals directly as well as indirectly, which has helped to increase financial as well as physical capitals. On the other hand, the reduction in the provision of ecosystem services due to adverse effects of coal mining resulted in lower yields in traditional livelihood activities such as forest, agriculture, and animal husbandry. The paper suggests that in order to effectively internalize the externalities arising from coal mining and maintain the sustainability of local livelihood system in Odisha, there is a need to reinvest some part of resource rents in regeneration of natural capital of the region.

We present examples of globally aggregated valuations of ecosystem services and place them in the context of the value of global GDP. We discuss the distinction between weak and strong sustainability and their implications for the interpretations of monetary value. There is a need to expand valuation models beyond the monetization of periodic flows of goods and services to a recognition of the value of inherent resilience with ecosystems, whose reward may consist of risk reduction rather than higher yield. We describe increasing efforts within corporations and among investors in the financial ecosystem to identify, measure, and value both the impacts as well as the dependencies of corporate economic activity on natural capital.

Accounting education has a long history of successfully resisting ideas and innovations which may fundamentally challenge taken-for-granted assumptions. Whilst it is just about possible to adopt an understanding of sustainability which does not challenge fundamental assumptions about economy, capitalism and accounting, it is arguably the duty of education to encourage the exploration of such challenges. This chapter briefly reviews these contentions and then, having offered a review of approaches to sustainability accounting, suggests how educators might approach the question of how disruptive a sustainability accounting education might be. The underlying theme of the chapter is that if the educator and the student are not feeling uncomfortable and fundamentally challenged, then we are probably not looking at either sustainability or education.

Concepts of environmental justice and environmental sustainability have attracted steadily increasing interest amongst political theorists and political scientists in the past few decades. The explosion of interest in normative and policy dimensions of global climate change since the negotiation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) of 1992 have only accelerated this interest. Nevertheless, there is continuing disagreement in the literature concerning the meaning of sustainable development, the connection between environmental sustainability and norms of global and intergenerational justice, weak vs strong sustainability, and the extent to which normative theory can contribute to the implementation of policies of sustainable development. This chapter explores the conceptual development of environmental sustainability, and aims to show how normative theory can enrich the discussion of sustainable development in theory and in practice.

This paper is concerned with the normative underpinnings of popular sustainability indicators and country rankings. Attempts to quantify national sustainability in the form of composite indicators and rankings have increased rapidly over past decades. However, questions regarding validity and interpretability remain. This article combines theoretical and statistical tools to explore how input variables in five popular sustainability indicators can be related to different theoretical paradigms: weak and strong sustainability. It is shown that differences in theoretical interpretations affect input variable selection, which in turn affects indicator output. This points towards the risk of indicators becoming a sort of ‘circular argumentation construct’. The article argues that sustainability indicators and country rankings must be treated as theoretical just as much as statistical instruments. It is proposed that making underlying normative assumptions explicit, and making input variable selection more clear in a theoretical sense, can enhance indicator validity and usability for policy makers and researchers alike.

The purpose of this article is to challenge organizational scholars, management educators, and business leaders to consider more deeply the impact of global business activities on local ecosystems. Drawing on the management, sustainability, and entomology literature, we illustrate the complex relationship between global business and biodiversity loss through the lens of the commercial bumble bee trade. Global firms in this trade rear and supply bees for greenhouse crop pollination. We build on a well-known global strategy framework used in management education by adding a sustainability dimension, and offering propositions for the relationship between global business strategy and the strength of environmental sustainability. We conclude that a locally responsive, place-sensitive business strategy supports the strongest degree of environmental sustainability, and addresses the invisible compromises to ecosystem health that may result from the efforts of global firms to provide otherwise beneficial products and services.

Bryan Norton takes the debate over weak and strong sustainability to characterize the key conceptual disagreement among attempts to elaborate a theoretical approach to sustainability. In contrast, I argue that this debate is mired within assumptions of economic development theory that fail to recognize how elements of fragility, stability, resilience and adaptive capability within system design or organization have been material to the way that sustainability has been conceptualized in many domains. Two paradigmatic conceptualizations of sustainability compete within the scholarly literature, one stressing the availability of key resource stocks, the other stressing the robustness and resilience of system organization. A better approach would move beyond weak and strong sustainability to acknowledge a deeper and more philosophically potent set of paradigmatic features within sustainability scholarship.

The present generation's ethical dilemma over shortchanging future generations by overconsuming exhaustible resources could be relieved by a program of converting the capital from these resources into machines and living off the current flow of machines and labor. If the stock of machines is assumed not to depreciate, then the stock of productive capital and resources is not depleted. Cobb-Douglas technology is used to determine what will happen to consumption if only the rents from exhaustible resources are invested in reproducible capital goods. An important feature of Cobb-Douglas technology is that input in the form of minerals from an exhaustible resource is needed to get a positive output of the single produced commodity. Results of the model indicate that a savings investment rule will not provide for the maintenance of per capita consumption constant over time. Further studies have explored the effects of depreciations and intergenerational equity. 7 references.

Deforestation causes unsustainable development in tropical countries, compromising the well-being of future generations., Global sustainability strategies require assessing whether countries’ development trajectories are sustainable over time. However, sustainability assessments are limited because losses of natural capital and its ecosystem services through deforestation have not been comprehensively incorporated into national accounts. We update the national accounts of 80 nations that underwent tropical deforestation from 2000 to 2012 and evaluate their development trajectories using weak and strong sustainability criteria. Weak sustainability requires that countries do not decrease their aggregate capital over time. We adopt a strong sustainability criterion that countries do not decrease the value of their forest ecosystem services with respect to the year 2000. We identify several groups of countries: countries, such as Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India, that present sustainable development trajectories under both weak and strong sustainability criteria; countries, such as Brazil, Peru, and Indonesia, that present weak sustainable development but fail the strong sustainability criterion as a result of rapid losses of ecosystem services; countries, such as Madagascar, Laos, and Papua New Guinea, that present unsustainable development pathways as a result of deforestation; and countries, such as Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone, in which deforestation aggravates already unsustainable pathways. Our results reveal a large number of countries where tropical deforestation is both damaging to nature and not compensated by development in other sectors, thus compromising the well-being of their future generations.

This paper explores the concept of sustainable hospitality. The relevance and status of this area of enquiry are assessed by discussing the current status of the concepts involved. These discussions are then linked to progress made in sustainable hospitality both in research and practical applications in the hospitality industry. At least six principal schools of thought within hospitality are noted: hospitality science, hospitality management, hospitality studies, the "three domain school", the systems thinking school and the pragmatic tradition. This complexity and lack of clear definition are problems. The differences between sustainability and sustainable development, and between weak and strong sustainability add further complexities. This paper shows that progress in both sustainable hospitality and tourism has been limited by these problems. A series of technical, ethical and commercial problems are discussed. However, while sustainable hospitality as a research area is still in its infancy, it is concluded that it is very relevant within the wider context of sustainable tourism research, based on its impact and its specific position within the social-ecological-economic systems under investigation. Key areas of future work are suggested, notably to better understand the impacts of hospitality on the triple bottom line, and to explore systems approaches towards implementation.

The future of humanity depends on whether or not we have a vision to guide our transition toward sustainability, on scales ranging from local landscapes to the planet as a whole. Sustainability science is at the core of this vision, and landscapes and regions represent a pivotal scale domain. The main objectives of this paper are: (1) to elucidate key definitions and concepts of sustainability, including the Brundtland definition, the triple bottom line, weak and strong sustainability, resilience, human well-being, and ecosystem services; (2) to examine key definitions and concepts of landscape sustainability, including those derived from general concepts and those developed for specific landscapes; and (3) to propose a framework for developing a science of landscape sustainability. Landscape sustainability is defined as the capacity of a landscape to consistently provide long-term, landscape-specific ecosystem services essential for maintaining and improving human well-being. Fundamentally, well-being is a journey, not a destination. Landscape sustainability science is a place-based, use-inspired science of understanding and improving the dynamic relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being in changing landscapes under uncertainties arising from internal feedbacks and external disturbances. While landscape sustainability science emphasizes place-based research on landscape and regional scales, significant between landscape interactions and hierarchical linkages to both finer and broader scales (or externalities) must not be ignored. To advance landscape sustainability science, spatially explicit methods are essential, especially experimental approaches that take advantage of designed landscapes and multi-scaled simulation models that couple the dynamics of landscape services (ecosystem services provided by multiple landscape elements in combination as emergent properties) and human well-being.

Considering the ecological sustainability performance of different political regimes, it seems questionable whether the assumption of the general superiority of democracy can be maintained in this policy field. This paper compares the performance of democracies and autocracies (and their institutional subtypes) with regard to weak and strong ecological sustainability targets, on the one hand, while also analysing the impact of democracy and autocracy on different areas of ecological sustainability, on the other. This will be verified by quantitative analysis to measure the influence of regime type on ecological sustainability performance, as opposed to the effect of other possible explanatory factors.

The growth and expansion of tourism is a complex phenomenon and its study requires multiple disciplines. When related to sustainability, the growth limits and carrying capacity of destinations must also be considered. The objective of this article is to develop a methodology to assess the growth limits of tourist destinations, and this method is then applied to the management and planning of an open tourist resort. The limits to growth are established using a mathematical formulation (i.e., multicriteria analyses, based on the reference point methodology) based on synthetic indicators applied to two scenarios: weak and strong sustainability. There are two developments in this type of research. The first is that the application of this method is neither restricted to a natural protected area, which has its own rules and management, nor to an island possessing geographically controlled entry and exit points. Rather, this study focuses on an open coastal area with an economy based on mass tourism. Second, this new way of assessing growth limits uses a flexible formula – adaptable to other coastal areas, e.g., rural, natural, and urban – depending on the impacts generated by the tourism and the objectives specified by destination managers.

The aim of this paper is a sensitivity analysis with the core-periphery model of ‘new economic geography’ put forward in Grazi et al. (Environ Resour Econ 38:135–153, 2007). This model comprises interregional trade, agglomeration advantages and resource (land) use or environmental externalities. Grazi et al. (2007, GBR) compare a social welfare (SW) indicator with the ecological footprint (EF) indicator for measuring spatial sustainability of a set of land use configurations. Their main result is that the SW and the EF indicator can yield completely different rankings and only for extreme parameterizations of environmental externalities the rankings coincide. We adapt the model by interpreting total natural land as a resource constraint and differentiate between weak and strong sustainability. In a sensitivity analysis we show that the main results of GBR (2007) correspond to the case of weak sustainability in our adapted model version. In the case of strong sustainability our adapted model version shows the same welfare rankings for both indicators without the extreme parameterization that is necessary to obtain the same results in the original GBR (2007) model.

International audience; Sustainable development must satisfy the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. Although it looks at the economic, environmental and social aspects of sustainability, this article focuses specifically on an analysis of the concept in conjunction with the use and protection of natural resources. It shows how taking account of environmental goods, including the finite nature of certain natural resources, can change the way economists deal with the issues of growth, development and equity between generations. In this context, after a brief historical perspective on the concept of development, the paper shows how the potential for substitutability between natural and manufactured capital, for example in production technologies, lead to two paradigms, that of weak sustainability and that of strong sustainability. These two approaches are presented in an effort to explain how their merits can be mutually reinforcing.

Some of the difficulties connected with the concept of sustainable development can be resolved if we distinguish between sustainability of different types of assets, in particular between those that pertain to technological uses and those that do not. A weak concept of sustainability is appropriate for the former and a strong concept for the latter. Furthermore, time discounting is appropriate (in the relatively short run) for the former but not for the latter. It is concluded that instead of choosing between weak and strong sustainability, the two notions should be included in the same analysis, since they are needed to account for different kinds of assets.

The present paper analyzes the suitability of weak and strong sustainability assessment in the context of fisheries management. This topic is a mainstream issue in the field of ecological economics, but its application to fisheries is rather unexplored, even though fisheries have been the focus of many pioneering studies related to natural resource management. An overview of the current debate in the topic together with an application of a multi-disciplinary technique designed to assess fisheries sustainability (Rapfish) allows the closing of this gap. This is achieved by looking to the potential trade-offs among the multiple dimensions of fisheries sustainability and by analyzing the role of critical thresholds in such an assessment. The study of the Basque trawl fisheries operating in the North East Atlantic in the period 1996–2005 shows that the utility of weak sustainability is limited to the comparison of sustainability between fisheries. In contrast it is found that it is the strong sustainability concept together with the definition of critical thresholds that provides management with the tools for improved management and policy within a fishery.

Policy makers are being urged to take measures that will ensure sustainable consumption. This paper seeks to clarify the meaning of sustainable consumption, with reference to the more generalised concepts of weak and strong sustainability. A review of how the concept is being applied internationally is provided. Welfare economics principles are then used to critique the concept and finally some key implications for policy are drawn: to implement policies that allow the price mechanism to signal resource scarcity to consumers; to define and promote equity goals; and to pursue natural capital management goals efficiently.

To investigate the role of explicit and implicit assumptions in different models of weak and strong sustain-ability, the Solow/Hartwick model of intergenerational equity with nonrenewable resources is gradually extended to include renewable resources, endogenous technical progress, and stock pollution. This reveals the fundamental role of endogenous technical progress for sustainable development, the inconsistency of implicit sustainability assumptions in various models, as well as the existence of a Hartwick rule for Daly's steady-state economy. Moreover, it shows that the concepts of Solow sustainability and strong sustainability coincide as a special case of weak sustainability. The latter integrates economic and environmental concerns and aims at maintaining the welfare potential of an economy over time. It does not rule out economic growth by assumption. Rather, the analysis shows that environmental conservation and economic growth can be compatible with each other, without jeopardizing social welfare. Finally, the analysis shows that the discussion of sustain-ability models cannot be restricted to the explicit differences that are usually pointed out by their authors and commentators. Rather, implicit assumptions must be made explicit.

Concern about the negative impacts of growth and development on protected area ecosystems has drawn attention to methods for assessing ecosystem sustainability and management. Existing non-stochastic and stochastic methods for assessing weak and strong sustainability of ecosystems have several limitations. The non-stochastic method does not account for errors in measuring attributes, stochastic variability in attributes, and uncertainty about the relationship between ecosystem attributes and states (degrees) of ecosystem sustainability. Although the stochastic method better accounts for errors in measuring attributes, and stochastic variability in attributes than the non-stochastic method, it requires information about the probability distributions of attributes for different states of sustainability. Such information is not readily available. The fuzzy logic method overcomes the limitations of the non-stochastic and stochastic methods, but requires fuzzifying an index of sustainability in the case of weak sustainability, fuzzifying individual attributes in the case of strong sustainability, specifying and estimating membership functions for low, medium and high ecosystem sustainability, selecting a rule to determine whether an ecosystem is strongly sustainable based on the conclusions for fuzzy propositions, and specifying fuzzy sets for truth qualifiers when evaluating conditional and qualified propositions. Whether the benefits outweigh the costs of using the fuzzy logic method depends on the knowledge, data, and information available about the ecosystem, the expertise of the persons doing the assessment, and other factors. The non-stochastic, stochastic and fuzzy logic methods can be used to rank management alternatives and select a preferred alternative in cases where the current state of the ecosystem is unsustainable. Ranking management alternatives using a fuzzy logic method requires ordering the fuzzy scores for alternatives. All three methods for ranking management alternatives call for a group preference ordering for management alternatives in cases where individuals in the group have different preferences for alternatives.

Ecological economics is an emerging field that offers significant room for creativity and innovation at the conceptual level on how to operationalize sustainability. It integrates economics with ecology and many elements from both the natural and social sciences to provide an integrated perspective on environment-economy interactions. A major policy dilemma that ecological economics addresses is how policy-makers can influence markets, so that they receive the ‘right’ signals from the natural world and do not erode life support systems. This discussion paper identifies the key aspects of ecological economics in the form of themes, including: issues of scale; limits to growth and substitution; ‘correct’ prices; evolution of systems; weak and strong sustainability; technical progress; altering preferences; and the role of democracy. These aspects or themes are then applied to better understand the sustainability challenges facing transport systems. (Less)

This work reviews the tools and methods used for quantifying sustainable development. The paper first reviews categorization of the tools based on weak and strong sustainability. It then provides critical review of the UN review of sustainability indicators and the methods for calculating the indicators, which include the environmental footprint, capital approach to measuring sustainable development, green national net product, genuine savings, genuine progress indicator, indicator of sustainable economic welfare and human development indicator on sustainable development. The benefits of standardizing the assessment tools for sustainable development would be seen through well directed policy leading to a balance between economy, environment and society where none is compromised to achieve greater results in the other. However, there is still no single method of assessing the sustainability of development that is widely accepted as suitable and all methods developed have inadequacies that prevent a true measure of sustainable development from being determined. Keywords: Sustainability indicators, environmental footprint, genuine savings, sustainable economic welfare, human development indicator.

The purpose of this short overview paper is to set out the basic meaning of the concept of sustainable development and the challenges it poses for society. The paper also explores the complexities ...

A feature of the sustainability problem is that the preferences of future generations are uncertain. In this paper, we put forward a fairness-based definition of sustainability that takes this uncertainty into account. We analyze the implications of this definition in the context of a model of project evaluation. We show that our definition encompasses the concepts of non-declining welfare and of weak and strong sustainability. Furthermore, we show that preference uncertainty has a substantial influence on the implications of sustainability.

Appreciating the reliance of industrial networks on natural capital is a necessary step toward their sustainable design and operation. However, most contemporary accounting techniques, including engineering economics, life cycle assessment, and full cost accounting, fail in this regard, as they take natural capital for granted and concentrate mainly on the economic aspects and emissions. The recently developed "thermodynamic input-output analysis" (TIOA) includes the contribution of ecological goods, ecosystem services, human resources, and impact of emissions in an economic input-output model. This paper uses TIOA to determine the throughputs of natural and economic capitals along industrial supply networks. The ratios of natural to economic capitals of economic sectors reveals a hierarchical organization of the U.S. economy wherein basic infrastructure industries are at the bottom and specialized value-added industries constitute the top. These results provide novel insight into the reliance of specific industrial sectors and supply chains on natural capital and the corresponding economic throughput. Such insight is useful for understanding the implications of corporate restructuring on industrial sustainability metrics and of outsourcing of business activities on outsourcer, outsourcee, and global sustainability. These implications are discussed from the standpoints of weak and strong sustainability paradigms. The calculated ratios can also be used for hybrid thermodynamic life cycle assessment.

The capital approach is frequently used to model sustainability. A development is deemed to be sustainable when capital is not reduced. There are different definitions of sustainability, based on whether or not they allow that different forms of capital may be substituted for each other. A development that allows for the substitution of different forms of capital is called weakly sustainable. This article shows that in a risky world and a risk-averse society even under the assumptions of weak sustainability the circumstances under which different forms of capital may be substituted are limited. This is due to the risk-reducing effect of diversification. Using Modern Portfolio Theory this article shows under which conditions substitution of different forms of capital increases risk for future generations.

This article explores the contribution a pedagogical approach based in critical theory can make to education for sustainability in business schools. In addition to the regular business and environmental management curriculum that provides tools for incremental improvement, we advocate introducing a radical change perspective aligned more with the “strong” sustainability paradigm. Concepts from critical theory can be usefully employed to bridge weak and strong sustainability paradigms. A critical skillset incorporating reflexivity, critique, and social action/engagement is elaborated and illustrated through the incorporation of these skills in the framing of an environmental management/sustainability elective and through exercises.

This paper develops a methodology for identifying that natural capital-called critical natural capital (CNC)-the maintenance of which is essential for environmental sustainability. By consideration of the characteristics of natural capital, of the environmental functions that these characteristics enable natural capital to perform and of the importance of these functions to humans and the biosphere, it shows how sustainability standards in respect of these environmental functions may be derived. The difference between the current situation and these standards is termed the sustainability gap. The methodology that emerges from bringing these ideas together into a single analytical framework enables policy makers to identify the extent of current unsustainability, the principal causes of it, the elements and processes of natural capital (the CNC) which need to be maintained or restored to close the sustainability gap and the costs of so doing. The framework should therefore be of use in identifying priorities and policies for moving towards environmental sustainability. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.

Many attempts to operationalize the ecological concept of sustainability have been undertaken by the economics profession during recent years. It seems that many mainstream economists tend to focus their research on the assumption of substitutability between man-made (manufactured) capital and natural capital (natural resources, goods and services). The crucial points of this discussion can be seen especially in contributions by R. Solow (on a more theoretical level) and by R. Atkinson and D. Pearce (on an empirical level) who all plead for at least partial substitutability. As H. Daly has pointed out, the assumption of substitutability cannot be drawn in the search for an adequate treatment of natural resources in economic and ecological modeling and policy. The paper tries to clarify some questions regarding weak and strong sustainability indicators as well as sustainability rules for dealing with regional natural resources. In the first part of the paper, the assumption of substitutability is discussed in various aspects. Given weak sustainability indicators, calculating the ?sustainability" of a regional system (or national economy) becomes almost trivial. If the rate of depreciation of natural capital is at least offset by savings (accumulation) of man-made capital then the economy is on a sustainable development path. Besides the missing of the social ?branch" of sustainability, the depreciation-savings approach lacks understanding of the fundamental objections against monetizing natural resources (e. g. biodiversity). Some crucial aspects in this context are discussed in the paper (e. g. lexicographic preferences, ?consumer"-vs.-?citizen" approach). The strong sustainability indicators are in favor of different approaches, e. g. the save-minimum-approach. The second part of the paper deals with practical sustainability rules on a regional level regarding water resources. If sustainability as a concept for future ecological, economic and social development is taken seriously, only physical constraints (taking time as an additional factor of production into account) and an applied precautionary principle can indeed lead to sustainability. Congress topic: Environmental Management, Sustainability and Development Keywords: Weak/Strong Sustainability Indicators; Regional Indicators for Sustainable Development

A conceptual and analytical approach is presented to reconcile weak and strong sustainability. It involves a reconsideration of the conception of total capital from an ecological‐economic system perspective. In particular, natural capital is classified into non‐renewable resources, renewable resources that are harvested, and those that are not used in production. Strong sustainability is defined in terms of constant environmental quality. Weak sustainability is characterised by non‐decreasing value of aggregate income and environmental quality, and formalised in terms of a “preference‐based social value function”. Ecosystem resilience and basic human needs are introduced as minimum sustainability requirements, and a “sustainability‐based social value function” is proposed, which is sensitive to potentially irreversible changes at the boundaries of the restricted opportunity space. It implies higher values associated to the trade‐offs between income and the environment than the preference‐based function, and the fact that sustainable development is only feasible if both minimum criteria are fulfilled.

Although sustainability became a watchword in recent years, the idea is by no means new. It has a long tradition in various domains ranging from a basic forestry principle, to economic growth and nature conservation objectives, and the present challenge of sustainable development. The latter does not only involve an extremely important transformation of the ecologically based concept of physical sustainability to the context of social and economic development. It implies the necessity for a holistic approach to integrate some basic principles of sustainability that have been developed in economics as well as in ecology. Since none of these traditional concepts is sufficient for sustainable development, which means conservation and change is balanced through an adaptive process, new approaches are required that extend the scope of analysis towards an ecological-economic synthesis. Such an integrated approach must particularly overcome the gap between the schools of weak and strong sustainability, and integrate principles from bio-economics and the economics of environmental conservation, along with comprehensive concepts of needs and wants, social equity, and ecosystem integrity. These are suitably represented in a socio-economic value principle, and usefully formalized in an intertemporal allocation framework with social and ecological sustainability constraints that allow the benchmarking of feasible and viable sustainable development paths. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment

Through the lens of conventional national accounting, resource depletion and natural environment degradation often appear misleadingly as desirable economic growth. The old System of National Accounts (SNA) has been revised and a set of environmental ‘satellite accounts’ proposed. Certain weaknesses, however, pervade the new proposals. The conventional measurements remain largely unaltered, and the satellite accounts are of unclear purpose and unnecessarily complex. As proposed, they rely on the valuation of environmental stocks, while the economically more important flow accounts, to their detriment, are to be derived indirectly from changes in stock values. The SNA, the paper stresses, is primarily an economic framework, incapable of capturing all environmental change, and the national accounts are far more useful economically than environmentally. Greening the accounts would be optional for most affluent countries, whose overriding environmental concern is pollution. This can be addressed directly through taxation and regulation. Pollution information in satellite accounts can indeed be valuable, but revised and fully integrated resource accounting is a priority concern for those developing countries that are running down natural resources, and for which conventional accounting distorts macroeconomic measurement, analysis and policy. The paper argues that green accounting can only ensure income (sometimes called weak) sustainability, which should be considered as a step leading ultimately to an ecological (or stronger) sustainability.

Conceptions of defining and measuring sustainable development can broadly be placed in two categories: weak and strong sustainability. The concept of weak sustainability is based on neo-classical economic theory and assumes that manufactured and natural capital are close substitutes. This means that costs of environmental deterioration (e.g., forest damage) can be compensated by benefits from manufactured capital (e.g., income). Thus, environmental damages are valued in monetary units. The concept of strong sustainability denies the degree of substitution that weak sustainability assumes, at least for some critical elements of natural capital. This paper pledges for strong sustainability indicators, especially for critical loads and critical levels. Since the costs and benefits of avoiding critical impacts have to be taken into account, a combination of strong and weak sustainability indicators—means a linkage of ecological (physical) and economic (monetary) approaches—should be suggested.

This paper analyzes the theoretical and empirical links between inequality in human development on the one hand and sustainability on the other. It specifically looks at causality in both directions. Inequality in various dimensions of human development is analyzed with respect to both weak and strong sustainability, where weak sustainability presumes substitutability among different forms of capital, while strong sustainability reject substitutability and calls for preservation of so-called critical forms of natural capital independent of the amount of investment into other forms of capital.

The measurement of sustainable development is not without considerable difficulties, yet this should not detract from the positive advances that can be made in this direction. In this paper we present one form that a “weak” sustainability indicator can take. Derived from a simple but intuitive savings rule, it incorporates the idea that the level of overall capital stock should be non-decreasing. Although subject to qualification at this stage, some interesting results emerge from the application of the rule to 18 countries.

Este paper usa un modelo inter temporal de las finanzas publicas que muestra que la inestabilidad politica puede causar que los impuestos sean desplazados hacia el futuro, resultando en un deficit fiscal que es sub-optimo y solo debilmente sostenible (en el sentido de Quintos). Esto ocurre debido a que la inestabilidad politica otorga al gobierno un incentivo para implementar una politica fiscal sesgada de tal forma de incrementar su chance de mantenerse en el poder. El gobierno consigue esto retardando los impuestos (o avanzando los gastos) de tal forma de adquirir respaldo politico, el cual a su vez causa una tendencia positiva en el proceso de deficit fiscal aumentando con ello la probabilidad de una crisis fiscal. Usando datos para Chile para el periodo 1833-1999, se presentan los resultados de pruebas estadisticas que respaldan el modelo

The literatures and debates on human development on the one hand and sustainability on the other share much in common. Human development is essentially what sustainability advocates want to sustain and without sustainability, human development is not true human development. Yet the two strands of research have largely been separate and this paper shows how they can learn from each other. I put forward a concrete proposal on how human development and its measurement in the form of the Human Development Index (HDI) can be linked with measures of both weak and strong sustainability. Weak sustainability is built on the assumption that different forms of capital are substitutable, whereas strong sustainability rejects the notion of substitutability for certain critical forms of natural capital. Empirical results over the period 1980 to 2006 show that many of the lowest performing countries on the HDI also face problems of weak unsustainability, as measured by genuine savings. Countries with high to very high HDI performance, on the other hand, typically appear to be strongly unsustainable, as measured by ecological footprints, mostly because of unsustainably large carbon dioxide emissions. Two of the biggest challenges facing mankind this century will be to break the link between high human development and strongly unsustainable damage to natural capital on the one hand, requiring a very significant and rapid decarbonisation of their economies, and assisting countries with very low human development to overcome weak unsustainability by raising their investment levels into all forms of capital on the other.

Interest in sustainable development has prompted a search for suitable indicators that might complement or supplant the traditional measures of economic success. Although there is no agreement about the precise meaning of sustainable development, one idea which is increasingly in good currency is that sustainable development requires that the stock of capital that one generation passes on to the next be maintained or enhanced. Further, this stock of capital is seen by some to comprise two elements: manufactured capital and ‘natural capital’. The extent to which these are believed to be substitutes or complements is one factor which separates the neoclassical school from some of its critics. A premise of this paper is that if capital theory is relevant to sustainable development, then it should also be helpful in developing indicators. However, even within the normal confines of economics, capital theory is not a homogeneous body of analysis. Therefore, an exploration of capital theory and its relevance to sustainable development can be expected to generate various perspectives on those measures most useful for gauging the sustainability of economic activity. It is these linkages between capital theory in various schools of thought and possible indicators of sustainable development that are the subject of this paper.

The paper explores the consequences of limited substitutability in welfare between environmental and produced goods for long-term evaluation. I show how the magnitude and time development of optimal social discount rates depend on the substitutability between the different classes of goods. The notions of weak and strong sustainability are translated into the degree of substitutability. I show that a strong notion of sustainability results in lower weights given to long-run service and consumption streams compared to a weak notion of sustainability.

There has been increasing demand in Canterbury, New Zealand for the abstraction of water from rivers. This demand has led to the increased interest in dam projects. But, while river impoundment can result in significant benefits, it also can come at "cost", especially to river ecology. Given these benefits and costs, it is essential that impounded rivers are systematically evaluated for their sustainability. In this paper the ecosystem services approach is applied for the purposes of evaluating the sustainability of the Opihi River located in South Canterbury. Indicators are used to represent the set of ecosystem services provided by the river. Both the criteria of weak and strong sustainability are evaluated in a novel way. Weak and strong sustainability are operationalised through an ecosystem services index and the safe minimum standard concept, respectively. In applying these evaluation methods it is observed that since the construction of the Opuha Dam, the Opihi River has progressed towards weak and strong sustainability.