Sustainability

Sustainability is usually defined as the processes and actions through which humankind avoids the depletion of natural resources, to keep an ecological balance that does not allow the quality of life of modern societies to decrease. Meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. 

In this way, the term “sustainability” has been broadly applied to characterize improvements in areas like natural resources overexploitation, manufacturing operations, the linear consumption of products, the direction of investments, citizen lifestyle, consumer purchasing behaviors, technological developments or business and general institutional changes.

Consumers and citizens unsatisfied with the long-term damage caused by corporate short-sighted focus on short-term profits, have turned sustainability into a mainstream concept able to ruin a company’s reputation and profits if unaddressed.

Today, sustainability is often spoken of with regard to climate change, which threatens life as we know it as is being largely caused by industrial practices. That is one of the reasons why today many companies have corporate responsibility strategies.