Sustainability

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

• the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and
• the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.’

Source: A/42/427. Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, chapter 2 (1987; http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-02.htm)

“The needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (UN World Commission on Environment & Development: Brundtland Commission, 1987). UN Sustainability goals.

Sustainability science through interdisciplinarity

To make science more sustainable, interdisciplinarity approaches are indispensable as they integrates knowledge, concepts and methods from different disciplines in all sciences. The definitions for interdisciplinarity vary across different philosophical schools. It can be opposed to disciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, though. In contrary to disciplinary science, interdisciplinarity is characterized as cross-disciplinary interaction. Also, while multidisciplinarity means apposing knowledge and claims from different disciplines, interdisciplinarity requires the integration of diverse knowledge. As easy as it might sound, though, the actual implementation of interdisciplinarity, especially for sustainability science, is difficult since the structure of academia often interferes with the integration of several disciplines. (Thorén, Nagatsu & Schönach, 2021)

Sustainability in linguistics

On the societal journey towards the compliance with the SDGs, academia plays an important role. All sciences, not only natural or sustainability science, have potential to be a part of a more sustainable development. Sustainability in linguistics is still being scrutinized but some ideas already exist or are implemented.

References

Thorén, H., M. Nagatsu and P. Schönach. 2021. ‘Interdisciplinarity’. In Situating Sustainability: A Handbook of Contexts and Concepts, edited by C. P. Krieg and R. Toivanen, 21–37. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-14-2.