Sustainable development – the foundation for sustainability assessment
The traditional underlying concept of sustainability is that
both economy and society are constrained by environmental limits. The concept of sustainable development is the basis for sustainability assessments. In 1972 the Club of Rome described the challenge of an ever growing population and limited natural resources in “The Limits of Growth” . The conclusions of the report were that it is impossible for the population, exploitation of natural resources and pollution of the environment to continue to grow without the Earth system collapsing at some point. The report concluded that to prevent this disaster, a collective commitment would be needed to curb the indiscriminate growth of the economy. There was a lot of anxiety, starting in the oil crisis in the early seventies until the eighties, about the inadequate supply of energy and food resources. But around the middle of the 1980s it became clear that the real limit to growth was not the imminent depletion of natural resources, it was the risk that production, consumption and pollution would reach the threshold of Earth’s inherent resilience (Colombo 2000) . Sustainable development was first described by the Brundtland Commission in their report “Our common future” in 1987 as ‘‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’’ (WCED, 1987) . Since then, the concept has been