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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.

There is a broad international consensus about the urgency of promoting a strong change towards energy models that are less dependent on non-renewable energy sources, more equitable, and truly environmentally friendly. In order to achieve this goal, we need to define the problem so that it can be operationally and comprehensively addressed. This paper presents a proposal of a framework for the analysis of the sustainability of energy models based on multiple criteria theory, which we consider comprehensive and operational enough. Its application to a real energy model, the Spanish one, shows that the framework is able to address most of the elements both of weak and strong sustainability and find a reasonable compromise within the limits of the problem.

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.

Assessing different types of sustainability is a complex procedure, which implies considering aspects of very different nature. One way to do this is using a system of single indicators measuring all these different aspects and aggregating them in an overall composite indicator. In line with the concepts of weak and strong sustainability, the compensability degree among the indicators allowed by the aggregation procedure is a crucial issue. There exist methods that allow for full compensability, zero compensability, or partial compensability. In most of them, the compensation degree is established in a global way, that is, it is the same for all the indicators. In this paper, we develop the Multiple Reference Point Partially Compensatory Indicator (MRP-PCI), where a different compensation index can be established for each indicator. The resulting method can be applied to any system of indicators, and successfully considers the compensation indices given. Some examples and comparisons are used to illustrate its behavior.

While sustainability has attracted the attention of managers and academicians for over two decades, the macro-level indicators of sustainability are not moving in the right direction. Climate change continues to be an existential threat for humanity and other indicators of sustainability do not fare much better. The logic of the business case and the associated framing of tension between financial outcomes and sustainability have generated a limited and inadequate response to the existential challenges before humanity today. In this essay, we analyze the evolution of sustainability in the business context and call for a recognition that social and environmental outcomes must supersede economic ones in corporate sustainability thinking. We call for a widening of the spatial, temporal, and moral lenses in the formulation and execution of business strategy to ensure that it is in alignment with the needs of current and future generations of humanity and proportionate to planetary conditions.

This article examines sustainability from a policy perspective rooted in environmental economics and environmental ethics. Endorsing the Brundtland Commission stance that each generation should have undiminished opportunity to meet its own needs, I emphasize the foundational status of the intergenerational commitment. The standard concepts of weak and strong sustainability, WS and SS, are sketched and critiqued simply and intuitively, along with the more recent concept of WS-plus. A recently proposed model of a society dependent on a renewable but vulnerable resource (Barfuss et al. 2018) is introduced as an expositional tool, as its authors intended, and used as a platform for thought experiments exploring the role of risk management tools in reducing the need for safety. Key conclusions include: (i) Safety, in this case, the elimination of risk in uncertain production systems, comes at an opportunity cost that is often non-trivial. (ii) Welfare shocks can be cushioned by savings and diversification, which are enhanced by scale. Scale increases with geographic area, diversity of production, organizational complexity, and openness to trade and human migration. (iii) Increasing scale enables enhancement of sustainable welfare via local and regional specialization, and the need for safety and its attendant opportunity costs is reduced. (iv) When generational welfare is stochastic, the intergenerational commitment should not be abandoned but may need to be adapted to uncertainty, e.g., by expecting less from hard-luck generations and correspondingly more from more fortunate ones. (v) Intergenerational commitments must be resolved in the context of intragenerational obligations to each other in the here and now, and compensation of those asked to make sacrifices for sustainability has both ethical and pragmatic virtue. (vi) Finally, the normative domains of sustainability and safety can be distinguished&mdash, sustainability always, but safety only when facing daunting threats.

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 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.

Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo analisar como o posicionamento dilemático entre homo economicus x sustinens pode desdobrar-se em decisões em startups; sob a ótica do empreendedorismo sustentável e da sustentabilidade fraca e forte. Foram investigadas as orientações dos empreendedores para a sustentabilidade como seres humanos, verificando se eles são movidos pelo raciocínio oportunista ou pelo raciocínio sustentável. Junto a isso, uma análise sobre tomada de decisão nestes empreendimentos e seus dilemas são apresentados, sob a ótica do empreendedorismo sustentável. Por fim, uma breve discussão sobre sustentabilidade forte e fraca é apresentada, utilizando-se como pano de fundo da discussão a lente do paradigma dominante da competitividade em relação à sustentabilidade de Fergus e Rowney (2005). Foram realizadas entrevistas com 5 empreendedores de startups, coletando-se dados primários e secundários, trabalhando-se com análise de conteúdo, numa pesquisa de natureza qualitativa sob o paradigma interpretativista. A partir dessa pesquisa e considerando as características identificadas na literatura, percebeu-se um comportamento inclinado para a sustentabilidade e o homo sustinens, porém este comportamento aparece com uma tendência para uma sustentabilidade mais fraca. O paradigma científico-econômico ainda é dominante, restringindo ou condicionando as escolhas sociais e ambientais. A dimensão social mostrou-se mais presente do que a ambiental, apesar da ambiental ser o motivo ou a ideia propulsora inicial da busca da sustentabilidade. This research aimed to analyze how the dilemmatic positioning between homo economicus x sustinens can unfold in decisions in green startups; from the perspective of sustainable entrepreneurship and weak and strong sustainability. The entrepreneurs' guidelines for sustainability were investigated, as human beings, checking if they are driven by opportunistic reasoning or by sustainable reasoning. Along with this, an analysis on the decision-making of enterprises and their dilemmas are presented, from the perspective of sustainable entrepreneurship. Finally, a brief discussion on strong and weak sustainability is presented, using the lens of the dominant paradigm of competitiveness in relation to sustainability by Fergus and Rowney (2005), as a background of the discussion. Five interviews were carried out, based on 5 startup entrepreneurs, collecting primary and secondary data, working with content analysis, in a qualitative research under the interpretive paradigm. From this research and considering the characteristics identified in the literature, a behavior more inclined towards sustainability and homo sustinens is considered, however this behavior appears as part of a weaker sustainability. The scientific-economic paradigm is still dominant, restricting or conditioning social and environmental choices. The social dimension proved to be more present than the environmental dimension, despite the environmental being the motive or initial propelling idea of the search for sustainability.

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.

Highlights • European Union Blue Growth is assessed by set of 18 indicators for 15 EU coastal states. • The results put into question that the EU has achieved comprehensive blue growth. • Unsustainable development is in particular driven by increasing fishing mortality. Abstract The Sustainable Development Goal for the oceans and coasts (SDG 14) as part of the 2030 Agenda can be considered as an important step towards achieving comprehensive blue growth. Here, we selected a set of 18 indicators to measure progress against SDG 14 for 15 EU coastal countries in the Baltic and the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean since 2012. In our assessment we distinguish between a concept of weak and strong sustainability, assuming high and low substitution possibilities, respectively. Our results indicate that there are countries which managed to achieve sustainable development under both concepts of sustainability (most notably Estonia, achieving the strongest improvement), but that there are also countries which failed to achieve sustainable development under both concepts (most notably Ireland and Belgium, experiencing the strongest decline). Unsustainable development is in particular driven by increasing fishing mortality and reduced willingness to set total allowable catch in accordance with scientific advice.

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.

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.