Sustainable design benefits from a range of approaches and techniques, and flexibility in what to apply where
The term 'sustainability' has both a communication problem and an image problem. It doesn't necessarily resonate with most people on first encounter. The trend to describe it in terms of 'quality of life' will help communicate its relevance to a wider audience.
This can also help combat the image problem - that sustainability is about suffering, turning back the clock, 'doing without'. Unless it becomes relevant and appealing to society at large, it will get nowhere. A similar challenge is how to permeate the organisation with an understanding of what sustainability is and how it can benefit employees and customers as well as the wider body of 'stakeholders'. Sustainability needs to be integrated across the board - and that needs real support at a senior level - a couple of workshops might get the ball rolling but they won't build it into the system.
Despite a burgeoning of case studies and good examples of the benefits of sustainable design for business, more clear-cut evidence for its link to competitiveness is still needed. Among others, organisations such as SustainAbility (a consultancy) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD - a think tank formed by a number of leading multinationals) are working at this.
Partly linked to making the business case is the need to find ways to measure sustainability at both a regional/national level, and within organisations.
Most of the work on sustainable design has focused on the supply side - helping companies rethink the way they operate. On the demand side there is some innovative work going on to engage consumers in the creation of a more sustainable future.
In addition, the move to meet the needs of emerging markets among low income people in developing countries has to tread a fine line between providing products and services for billions of un(der)served customers, without doing so at the levels of resource use found in developed markets.
There are a number of tools available to help with sustainable design, from checklists to software programmes. These can help with setting design priorities and providing life cycle data on materials, for example. However, the awareness (let alone take-up) of such tools by designers, engineers and companies, is astonishingly low.
Lack of knowledge is part of the problem, but many tools are too quantitative and dry to appeal to designers. Some work is emerging to try to bridge the language barrier between different disciplines. Finding the right tools and information can be difficult because it isn't widely known or accessible to people outside the field.
Some sustainable resources - renewable materials or energy, for example - have not yet reached the critical mass to compete with conventional, less sustainable resources. Legislation and the greening of public procurement can help create markets, and initiatives such as the UK Government's WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme) programme - which focuses on creating stable and efficient markets for recycled materials and products - are intended to encourage this.
The rapid economic development of China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, has colossal implications for sustainable development. The world simply cannot withstand economic growth on the traditional model on such a scale. These two countries, which are increasingly grouped together with Brazil and Russia into the so-called BRIC group, are key to global sustainability.
For example, the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2006 notes that the US currently consumes three times more grain per person than China and five times more than India. If China and India were to match that consumption, we would need two planet Earths simply to sustain their economies. If China’s per capita grain consumption were to double to reach European levels, China would need about 40% of the world’s global grain harvest.