IUCN (The World Conservation Union) released a report on the future of sustainability based on a January 2006 meeting. Some highlights:

The idea of sustainability

At the start of the twenty-first century, the problem of global sustainability is widely recognised by world leaders, and a common topic of discussion by journalists, scientists, teachers, students and citizens in many parts of the world.... (1) The ‘greening’ of business has grown to be a central issue in corporate social responsibility for many global companies, although for many it is still a boutique concern within wider relationship management, rather than something that drives structural change in the nature or scale of core business. There is a profound paradox here. On the one hand, the twenty-first century is widely heralded as the era of sustainability, with a rainbow alliance of government, civil society and business devising novel strategies for increasing human welfare within planetary limits. On the other hand, the evidence is that the global human enterprise rapidly becoming less sustainable and not more. Much has been achieved - but is it enough? (3)

Critiques of sustainable development

The idea of sustainability is 30 years old, and was "coined explicitly to suggest that it was possible to achieve economic growth and industrialization without environmental damage." (1) The very vagueness of the term has been useful in generating consensus about the ends; however, "The idea of sustainable development may bring people together but it does not necessarily help them to agree goals." (3)

The challenges for the future are 1) to more completely articulate a common understanding of the means necessary to achieve sustainability, and 2) repair a couple problematic assumptions in our current thinking about sustainability-- in particular, the assumptions implicit in the language of "tradeoffs" between environment, society, and markets. This puts each on an equal footing when in fact 'the environment underpins both society and economy;" nor is it a human construct, when both of the others are.

The state of the world

The central problem we now seem to face is that today's environmental challenges are unprecedented in their scale and consequences. As a result, "business as usual" is bound to be inadequate, for this not "environment as usual."

Further, we're seeing how environment, economic development, and security are all connected.

This leads to the obsolescence of two concepts: externalities, and the future. Externalities are things that don't need to be accounted for in our decision-making. The future is a place where problems or the consequences of present actions can be deferred. We can no longer behave as if either exists.

Urgency, risk and opportunity

Efforts to raise living standards of the world's poor create urgency and risk for the global environment in this century. However, the rapid industrialization of China may show the world the basic problems of current industrial and development models, by compressing 150 years of economic growth, dislocation, and pollution into 30-- and doing so in a way that impacts the entire globe.

If so, that understanding will join technological and scientific opportunities to develop new paths to sustainable development.

A new challenge

Despite the achievements of the last three decades, the present concepts of sustainability and sustainable development are clearly inadequate to drive the transitions necessary to adapt human relations with the rest of the biosphere for the future. Something new is needed. The problem with sustainability and sustainable development is not that the aspirational values they represent are wrong, but that they are over-worked and tired, As currently formulated they are too loose to drive effective change on the scale required.

Don't abandon the concept of sustainability, as it has strong brand value; refine it. And do it now, because the indications are that we're really going to have to make some serious, world-changing choices within the next 15 years.

New concepts, new thinking

The Club of Rome report, the work of Paul Erlich, and other early 1970s thinkers assumed that natural resources would constitute the "limits to growth." Resource substitution and the growth of service economies proved these predictions wrong; but that shouldn't distract us from the fact that environmental services constitute a new, ultimate limit on sustainable economic expansion.

Further, this new limit may put huge strains on social and political institutions, particularly in the developing world (which is most likely to bear the brunt of climate change-related disasters).

Sustainability's agenda for the future

So what does the sustainability movement need to do to move forward?

1. Rethink assumptions about economic growth and prosperity. "Sustainability needs to be made the basis of a new understanding of human aspiration and achievement." (12)
2. Previously, sustainability has mainly been an ethical imperative. We need to device the tools to let us see it as an economic imperative as well. "We need to devise metrics to make the economy ‘tell the economic truth’, especially about the externalities of industrial, economic and social processes." (13)
3. Pay more attention to markets as tools for achieving environmental goals. Further, "Consumption has to be made be a driver of positive change, not a driver of global degradation."
4. Enlist "bottom-of-pyramid solutions to sustainability challenges." (16) After all, these are the people who are going to bear the brunt of environmental disaster.

Source: W. M. Adams, The Future of Sustainability: Rethinking Environment and Development in the Twenty-First Century (pdf). World Conservation Union, 2006.