Short answer: No. ESG — Environmental, Social, and Governance — is an investor-risk lens: a set of criteria used to assess how non-financial factors might affect a company’s financial performance and risk profile. Sustainability, in its original formulation, is a claim about what a company’s activity is doing to the world, independent of whether that […]
Author: 814543pwpadmin
Is the Triple Bottom Line the Same as Sustainability?
Short answer: No. The Triple Bottom Line — People, Planet, Profit — is a reporting and accountability framework, not a definition of sustainability. It’s commonly used as shorthand for sustainability itself, but the person who coined the term has publicly said that usage is a distortion of what he intended, and formally called for the […]
What Does the Brundtland Report Actually Say About Sustainable Development?
Short answer: The one-line definition everyone repeats — development that meets present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own — is real, but it is not the full definition. The 1987 report immediately qualifies it with two conditions that are almost never quoted: an explicit priority for the essential needs […]
What Are You Trying to Sustain?
The danger of assuming we mean the same thing. Imagine I invite you to play football after work. As an Englishman, I arrive carrying a round ball. As an American, you arrive carrying an oval one. Neither of us is wrong. Neither of us misunderstood the invitation. We both understood the word football. The problem […]
Why Has Sustainability Produced So Much Activity… Yet So Little Transformation
The first essay in The Inquiry. For more than forty years, one question has guided my work. Why has business sustainability produced so much activity—and yet so little transformation? Circularity Edge Intelligence is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. It is not a […]
What Sustainability Was Meant to Mean
Before we can improve sustainability, we need to know what we mean by it. Few words in modern business are used more often—and defined less carefully—than sustainability. Over the past four decades, it has appeared in annual reports, corporate strategies, international agreements, university courses, government policies, and investment frameworks. It has become one of the […]