There are several factors to achieve social goal for people to co-exist on Earth over a long time. And it involves connecting what is known through scientific study to applications in pursuit of what people want for the future.
Sustainability factors include, but is not limited to economics, social, and cultural issues:
Economic Sustainability
Economic sustainability involves reducing hunger and energy poverty.
The Brundtland report states that “poverty causes environmental problems. Poverty also results from them”. Addressing environmental problems requires understanding the factors behind world poverty and inequality. The report demands a new development path for sustained human progress. It highlights that this is a goal for both developing and industrialized nations.
UNEP and UNDP launched the Poverty-Environment Initiative in 2005 which has three goals: reducing extreme poverty, greenhouse gas emissions, and net natural asset loss. This guide to structural reform will enable countries to achieve the SDGs. It should also show how to address the trade-offs between ecological footprint and economic development.
Social Sustainability
Society is sustainable, in social terms, if people do not face structural obstacles in key areas. These key areas are health, influence, competence, impartiality and meaning-making.
All the domains of sustainability are social. These include ecological, economic, political, and cultural sustainability. These domains all depend on the relationship between the social and the natural. The ecological domain is defined as human embeddedness in the environment. From this perspective, social sustainability encompasses all human activities It goes beyond the intersection of economics, the environment, and the social.
Cultural Sustainability
Cultural sustainability as it relates to sustainable development (or to sustainability), has to do with maintaining cultural beliefs, cultural practices, heritage conservation, culture as its own entity, and the question of whether (or not) any given cultures will exist in the future.
From cultural heritage to cultural and creative industries, culture is both an enabler and a driver of the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.
Culture is defined as a set of beliefs, morals, methods, institutions and a collection of human knowledge that is dependent on the transmission of these characteristics to younger generations.
Cultural sustainability has been categorized under the social pillar of the three pillars of sustainability, but some argue that cultural sustainability should be its own pillar, due to its growing importance within social, political, environmental, and economic spheres.
The importance of cultural sustainability lies within its influential power over the people, as decisions that are made within the context of society are heavily weighed by the beliefs of that society.
Sustainability is a broad and complex construct that literally deals with the life and death of our species. The Earth will continue without us (just like the dinosaurs). Do we, fellow planetary citizens, have the collective will and ingenuity to save ourselves?