Learning for Sustainability

We define this as learning to enable people to meet their needs without preventing future generations around the world from satisfying their own. This requires existing employees as well as future ones:

• to understand financial, environmental and social benefits of caring for the prosperity of our planet and its people;
• to practice practice values and new ways of thinking & relating;
• to create rich connections across subjects, departments & communities.

We need to discover the industrial-age mental conditioning which constrains each and every one of us today.

Definitions of sustainable development:

The learning approach:
"Where society rigorously improves its assumptions, and hence actions, with the intention of being able to continue indefinitely."

The Triple Bottom Line approach:
"Environmentally viable, socially just, and economically prosperous."

The Brundtland Report approach:
"Where people can meet their needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs."

The Amartya Sen approach:
"Where all have the capabilities to live their lives as they wish" [capabilities includes the right to act and the infrastructure ("functionings") to act, and so implies that environmental foundations of society are intact]

The freedom approach:
"Where people are free to choose how they live, unconstrained by the choices made in the past and without reducing the options for the future."

The capitals approach:
"Where society lives off the capital, not the revenue, of nature and society."

The safe minimum standard approach:
"Where people can choose how to live without the possibility of irreversible losses of critical environmental functions."

The UK Government Sustainable Development strategy approach:
"A strong, healthy and just society, living within environmental limits through a sustainable economy, good governance and responsible use of science."

Forum for the Future approach:
"Where people can realise their potential and improve their quality of life and simultaneously protect and enhance the Earth's life-support systems"

[Thanks for compiling that list are due to David Bent, Forum for the Future's Principal Sustainability Advisor, Business Programme.]