What is sustainability?

You have probably heard a lot of talk about sustainability – at school, on the news, in newspapers – but what does it actually mean?

Simply, the word sustainability refers to something that is able to be sustained, or able to exist indefinitely. But understanding sustainability is a little more complex. Understanding sustainability means understanding the core ecological concepts that are the key to life on earth. There are the flow of sunlight energy, and the cycling of water and materials.

The earth uses energy much in the same way we might use a bank account: we have a certain amount of money – a budget – which we add to and take from. The earth similarly has a budget – an energy budget. Energy comes in via sunlight and goes out, radiating back into space. However, this seemingly simple process of debiting and crediting energy is being altered by our use of fossilised fuels and other pollutants and gases into the atmosphere. This alteration is sometimes called climate change.

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Global warming, step lightly

Climate change may be the most important issue we have to deal with in our lifetimes. The climate has radically changed a number of times throughout the 4.6 billion years that the planet has existed, yet now it is changing more rapidly than perhaps at any other time in history. None of us will be immune from its effects and we all need to take action to help prevent the most extreme scenarios.

Global warming is created by complex changes in the atmosphere, caused by increasing amounts of invisible greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. These emissions are in turn caused by human activities including the use of fossil fuels for electricity, driving cars, growing crops, keeping livestock, and many other things we take for granted in our lives.

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