Sustainability: Why over emphasis of economic requirements can be disingenuous when talking about sustainability

Shifting the focus of sustainability towards economic terms and moving away from environmental and social aspects of sustainability can undermine the principles and core meaning of sustainability.

Sustainability is about balancing the requirements of each of the three themes of sustainability, although this doesn’t mean that there has to be a numerical one-third weighting to each of the themes. Determining the requirements of one theme needs to be undertaken with consideration of how they might interact and influence other themes, aiming to not compromise or be detrimental to their relevance and progress.

A strong focus on economic aspects will often result in financial benefits being prioritised as the main driver of sustainability. The message that can often be conveyed by this approach is that without financial profits there can be no sustainability. The economic angle can often be used to obscure less beneficial or harmful practices, often ignoring the costs created and only focusing on the benefits of the economic activity.

The external costs and negative impacts (environmental and social) of producing a financial profit from an activity are often excluded from the financial considerations. This approach does not reflect the true costs of the activity, because much has been excluded. For example, impacts of health from air pollution or damage to road infrastructure can be difficult to quantify, so the costs of these are often absorbed by the general public through additional taxation.

A strong focus on economic aspects can negate the essence of sustainability in that all three dimensions are interconnected and require some sort of balance to exist between them. By effectively detaching one of these dimensions, the concept is meaningless, or at the least significantly reduced.

Environmental limits, such as carrying capacity and nature’s ability to adequately regenerate, can often be ignored. The aim of some economic drivers can be to achieve short term quantitative economic growth, with corresponding profits, but this is also often to the detriment of long-term qualitative development. If this is the case then the concept of inter-generational responsibility, which is an important element in any definition of sustainability, is often ignored altogether.

Economics are an important aspect of sustainability, but only where environmental and social aspects are included and developed with the same degree of importance and relevance. Ignoring the supporting and interconnected nature of the three dimensions as a whole undermines the concept of sustainability. By over emphasising the economic dimension of sustainability, this distorts its meaning and should therefore be viewed as being disingenuous that aligns with undermining the concept of sustainability and is also an approach that can be viewed as greenwashing.