Sustainability

Sustainability is a flexible and variously defined concept that – irrespective of the exact wording – encompasses the awareness that natural resources are finite, that social and economic development cannot be detached from the environment and that equity across space and time is required if development is to be carried on in the long term. The concept, as well as its operative translations, was shaped across the years through several global conferences and meetings, in which state representatives agreed upon policy documents, plans, and goals. Hence, this institutional context must be kept in mind to understand properly the sustainability concept as well as the concerted efforts to integrate it within both regulatory evaluation processes, whereby the environmental effects of plans and projects are appraised, and voluntary schemes aiming at certifying the environmental “friendliness” of processes, products, and organizations. From an operational standpoint, several attempts have been made at measuring sustainability through quantitative indicators and at finding aggregate, easily communicable, indices to measure progresses and trends. In this respect, the adoption of big data is key to the assessment of the achievement of sustainability goals by complex societies. Recently, the resilience concept has emerged in sustainability discourses; this is a soft and somewhat unstructured approach, which is currently gaining favor because deemed appropriate to deal with ever-evolving environmental and social conditions.