A vocabulary for sustainability

ABSTRACT

The definitions of sustainability and sustainable development in the literature often appear contrasting and contradictory, raising the need for clarification and standardization. This manuscript introduces a formal vocabulary for sustainability to achieve word and meaning standardization for sustainability researchers and strategists. It formalizes key concepts such as processes, systems, ecosystem, sustainability, development and adaptation by providing an English description and a mathematical formalization. These support a high degree of consistency and applicability for science and explicit the approximations needed to deal with the complexity of the specific context they inquire about. The clarifications also allow the author to conclude distinguishing sustainability, its necessary conditions and related strategies. He shows that sustainability may need exploitation, adaptation, parasitism, or mutualism, which these must not be confused with sustainability itself, and that mutualism entails the most extended longevity.

KEYWORDS:

• sustainability
• sustainable development
• sustainability strategies
• vocabulary

Public interest statement

There is no unique and shared definition of sustainability; hence, we need clarification and standardization. This paper introduces a formal vocabulary for sustainability that uses both an English description and a deep mathematical formulation to help generate a consistent discourse for sustainability analytically and strategically. The vocabulary proposed highlights that sustainability is not necessarily adaptation, exploitation, parasitism, or mutualism; each is a potentially necessary condition for being sustainable, but they are not sustainability itself. The paper concludes by showing that mutualism guarantees the most longevity and that, whenever possible, it should be the favourite strategy.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the precious conversations with Niccolo’ Ciolli that enriched this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

I confirm that all the research meets ethical guidelines and adheres to the legal requirements of the study country.

Notes

1. ’After a defined period of time, the program, clinical intervention, and/or implementation strategies continue to be delivered and/or individual behaviour change (i.e. clinician, patient) is maintained; the program and individual behaviour change may evolve or adapt while continuing to produce benefits for individuals/systems’ (Moore et al., 2017).

2. ’This paper defines environmental sustainability as meeting the resource and services needs of current and future generations without compromising the health of the ecosystems that provide them … and more specifically … as a condition of balance, resilience, and interconnectedness that allows human society to satisfy its needs while neither exceeding the capacity of its supporting ecosystems to continue to regenerate the services necessary to meet those needs nor by our actions diminishing biological diversity’ (Moreli, 2011).

3. ’From Rio to Kyoto, Bali, and Copenhagen, one of the defining concepts of our contemporary global culture is “sustainability”. But what is sustainability and how is it justified? What are we trying to sustain? Obviously, not everything that is sustainable is worth sustaining. So what makes some things worth sustaining and others not? Different answers have been given by different groups that reflect their own interests. How are we to judge among competing interests? To answer these questions, we will argue that sustainability is at its heart a matter of ethics. To some this view may seem obvious. However, it is often overlooked or assumed without question. The problem with this situation is that when ethical views are left unspoken and assumed, the door is opened for counterproductive disputes. The goal of this paper is to explore the ethical foundation of sustainability, and highlight its essential importance’ (Gomis et al., 2011).

4. The reader should note that an object can be composed by a unique process such that from now on we will refer exclusively to objects to identify both a unique and a set of processes (whenever this set is not a system).

5. The reductionism applied by these examples to explain the terminology stresses how a discourse based on acceptable approximations may either lead to make huge mistakes or re-understand better our world.

6. Any goal is composed by processes, whenever aggregated, and any process must be perceptible, that as we saw means that the domain differs from the codomain and that both domain and codomain are not empty set.

Additional information

Funding

The author received no direct funding for this research.

Notes on contributors

Demetrio Miloslavo Bova

Demetrio Miloslavo Bova is affiliated with the University of Florence and the University of Warsaw. He is a specialist in sustainable development policy and indicators. He is a methodologist and, among the others, he invented the concept and the method to measure the necessary intergenerational equity, the equivalent number of equals, he wrote a handbook about the measurement of sustainable and equitable wellbeing at the local level, and is the author of the Berserker Policy.