hello and welcome to the certificate program on sustainability for Indian businesses from the center for continuing education at it Madras this course is offered by the school of sustainability I'm Dr sattin Naran an associate professor and the steering committee faculty at the school I'm also the head of the energy Consortium one of the leading centers in the country on decarbonization studies in this modules on Essentials of sustainability we will attempt to trace the historical roots of the concept in the modern era particularly after the um after the global world global developed world uh affluence of the 60s and' 70s many of the discourses and definitions that have been shaped by the realization of the accumulated impact of development in the industrial world to set the context we attempt to understand what is sustainability and sustainable development it is very abs ract as a concept and often we may find it easier to call out what is not sustainable this particular module is called the essentials of sustainability and we will attempt to draw a broad SWAT by tracing the roots of sustainability to understand where we are right now even before the formal introduction of the term sustainability in common usage many thought process and constructs all of which attempted to bring forward some of the element ments of what we now attempt to codify as sustainable practices came about many of these discourses came from a particular view of the world it often starts with depletion of resources which was mostly uh physically absorbed because of overe exploitation of a particular resource examples could be depletion of fish or depletion of wood uh the sustainable wood migration practices or wood generation practices uh so on and so forth a loss of productivity of say farmlands is of in many of the countries due to industrialized cropping also are part of these kind of discourses however sustainability and the the later explanation of sustainability was expanded to sustainable development and it is just beyond looking at the cost and effect relationships and really attempting to take a systemic view so if you just look across the current words that are being used to understand what is sustainability you can probably come across many words such as circularity which is often mistaken to be sustainability uh the other one we keep talking about is natural Capital so what is the natural Capital what have we been endowed with this is very uh probably very common when we talk about the Earth overshoot Day and so on the other thing that we also hear a lot is about the climate neutrality and Net Zero now is net zero sustainability or is being climate neutral sustainable we also often think think of in terms of cradle to cradle where you're talking about in combination with circularity in combination with circular economy we talk about returning material back to its original form and then some set of people really talk about the societal resilience resilience of society and these are the set of people who want to understand the adaptation assuming that things will go wrong assuming that there is going to be a challenge in terms of our survival and the rate at which we can deliver things so do all of these Define the same sustainability or is sustainability something more than each of these the primary challenge that we face in defining sustainability is because we have not had a very clear definition of what it really means and U depending on the school of thought and depending on the discourses that you want to follow and depending on the uh point of view that you want to take you can pick any one of them and argue that this is what sustainability is so it's as such if we want to put our hand on what it is it's it's still now very Elusive and a bit hard to kind of Define so there was now the most commonly used there is this now most commonly used uh so-called definition which is uh which which was put out by the bertland commission on the title our common future uh it is said as sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generation to make their own needs now if you really look at this statement there are a couple of uh uh challenges that come out one as a definition it is fairly useless because it is not precise uh it does not have anything that we can take to further identify or not identify practices it is also something that we cannot act upon immediately however as a ideal as a as a as a broad Vision it is quite lofty which is something that has allowed people to now started refining on these kind of um uh what do you call as statements and then further work on it now this particular statement came about after a very large amount of uh discussions and discourses that has happened since the postmodern post World War II era where affluence began to raise and there's a lot of consumption-driven economy that started getting created now as such when we start having material consumption when you start Having excess of material consumption concepts of circularity started coming in and it just after the uh definition of sustainable development came in circularity started gaining traction primarily because we had the challenge of not being able to put things in action so what about the definition what do we need to put things in action circular economy started coming out and it gained real amount of traction uh in terms since the uh 2013 so it it first appeared in 2018 and the Search terms based on Google started appearing U uh doubling in its appearance since 2013 broadly it was defined as a closed loop reuse of resources within our material industrial ecosystem so if you talk about circularity and circular economy you might often see most of these discourses are tied towards consumption consumption of materials and particularly in post consumer products for example uh reusing plastics for example reusing discarded electronic items so it is in a sense linked to the technosphere that we have developed for ourselves the part of the challenge is it allows us if the part of the opportunities it allows us to externalize the kind of characteristics that we want to appear sustainable and allows us to act on it however the biggest challenge we have with circular economy is that it does not explicitly include other challenges particularly the social kind of challenges and also it does not include the ecological challenges now often what we may find is uh this confusion of circularity with sustainability uh creates a bit of a problem in terms of understanding sustainability as a whole uh the reason is it is the circularity as a concept is only defined on the object material plane which is defined on something that that we can touch and feel and it's something that we can see and observe and measure progress many of these other things about social and other kinds of influences are not taken into account it also sets up additional challenges because it does not explicitly talk about needs for example many times we see that um uh the resource view of circularity is fairly narrow in that if we really want to return a material back to its usable form often the effort that is taken often the work that's done on the material including energy water and so on is so much more that the Virgin material is a far more cost effective option uh this dissuades many people from going in terms of material efficiency or use efficiency this is primarily because uh all said and done there is also this concept of Economics that doesn't really feature much in discourses on circularity now if we really want to understand then sustainability what constructs do we have what do you what do you put forward as a construct to think about sustainability uh the first articulation of this came about in 1985 by an empowered Committee of thought leaders including Ms swam nadan which came up with some kind of a preamble so that broadly read and this this came out as a article called the global possible in 1985 and it said if you want to look at the world through the lens of resources through the lens of of Economics through the lens of production and consumption it broadly had these uh remarks which is population can be stabilized but then it can only be stabilized if there is productive jobs and access to land and credit and training which is what now we are talking about and we say we want to look at just Transitions and when we want to look at Skilling and green jobs and all the problem has remained the population has stabilized because of access to better resources better education and so on and so forth now the second thing that you also generally look at is agriculture right agriculture as a construct uh it is not about increasingly producing stuff but it's also about maintaining the ecosystem But there again it said uh this this was probably just coming out of the Green Revolution era where said agriculture can uh expand to meet all the demands but this can only happen if farming systems and Technologies uh of land of the developed world are explained to the world's Farmers now this was a construct when the population explosion was uh taken for a given and it's it said the population is continuously raising and it's going to put strain on the earth and the resources on the earth and how do we improve production and as I said this came out of multiples of examples of famine and really looking at technology Le interventions now the other school of thought in terms of uh what came out of the integrative design concept by Amry lens of the Rocky Mountain Institute is on the use of energy itself it said economic growth can be sustained with a very low energy input but then this can only happen if we have the right signaling in the market the right signaling comes from the prices of energies that we really deal with the policies that surround the policies that surround the energy infrastructure and also look at do we really need the energy that we are currently consuming now here the advocacy is towards looking at the holistic development um many attempts were developed as a part of this to understand and put together what we call as kpis indicators and other uh indices and metrics that will allow us to measure progress on each of them now these reports along with the various other research and various other articulation of sustainability resulted in this u b and commission's report on sustainable development which we now uh Trace to the roots of sustainability so this has evolved into multiple I would say Viewpoint there were a large number of metrices that came out including the human development index including the gross gross national happiness uh so on and so forth including the epis the environmental performance index we will talk about a little bit of those as we go forward but eventually all of this is what led to what we now know as the UN sustainable ability goals un sdgs the UN sdgs have taken root from multiple of this uh what call as roots of sustainability uh to come up with something that is reasonably inclusive and reasonably measurable the 17 goals are I would say a distillation of many many decades of activity that has come out so sustainability as a concept is not really new but the way it is articulated right now is certainly evolved over many uh I would say uh streams of thoughts are many constructs now we will look at some of the constructs which allows us to understand what are we talking about so the first and foremost uh these are six different conts six separate uh uh strains of thought that emerged prominently since the 1950s in discussions of phenomena such as inter relationship among the growth of population resource use PR pressure on the environment and then the concepts of ecological carrying capacity and then the concept of resources and environmental linkages concepts of biosphere meaning looking at Earth as an ecosystem as a closed environment and then you went on to understanding uh the causes of these unsustainable behavior and then there was this burden of technology and then the complaint about technology being the root cause of everything and which we right now see coming back to us again in terms of um the application of AI and the application of newer generation technology so it's a it's gone a full circle in terms of how each of this activity feeds on to the narrative that is being talked about then you have the uh the final concept that came out is ecod development which which recognized that there is a need for development as opposed to the no growth slow growth hypothesis which said if we grow any further it's going to create more damage on the environment so we can't grow anymore and this uh kind of came up came about based on the U System Dynamics work that was done by J Forester and team at MIT but then uh now we are into a new paradigm which talks about um the role of everything put together in a holistic way so in a sense if you want to understand sustainability it really requires us to understand the overall ecosystem overall system the word the the operating word there is the system the overall systemic view of each of each and every activity and also understand what do we want to sustain and what do we want to develop so these are the two operating words here like we want to develop we want to sustain but how do we Define what to sustain and what do we develop and look at it inter relatedly not look at it as a individual indicator but a connected indicator so these were these were some of the uh early works that uh kind of related led us to development of what we now know as sustainable development indicators right so let's look at each one of them a little bit in uh a little bit in detail uh and then we will understand how we can apply the the whole evolution of sustainability as a concept into the current uh what I call as reporting mechanisms that we have so in a sense from an abstract um thought process to strain of thoughts to where it right now is in terms of indicators and measurement parameters uh there is a group grow trajectory that has happened that has gone through multiple iterations multiple discourses uh countries agreeing and countries disagreeing and coming up with joint statements that has allowed us to identify these um kpis so the first and foremost uh was the ecological carrying capacity route This was um one of the earliest Concepts based on that the Earth has only a limited carrying capacity which means it is found found in ecology where I mean things like where there is a competition for resources and once the population goes beyond a certain level the resources are competing the the population is competing with each other for the same resources and then they die down naturally so there is like a balance and when we meddle with it we get into problems of overpopulation resource exploitation and then you will generally look into challenges of uh challenges of uh degradation of the environment now in this particular case ecologists were the one who primarily started looking at it by looking at destruction of habitats and this is around the same time the conservation movement took forward like the iucn which now maintains a list of endangered list of animals it's uh which generally maintains these um it's a Conservancy Network which maintains a list of endangered animals and which kind of puts together population statistics of the biosphere the the the biomass in the biosphere so it kind of started in that uh it kind of started in that um framework where it said basically the not considering basically not considering the impact of development on the ecosystem will lead to a disaster so these were one of the first articulation of understanding the impact of development on the E ecosystem and then there is also carried on with the thought that the ecosystem can only provide sustenance to a maximum number of living species so here the carrying capacity also came about as a follow on thought which said it is the population that can be sustained by an ecosystem and when overp population occurs uh the carrying capacity is exceeded and what do we see here is most of these arguments were uh constructed based on on physical phenomena like the availability of land and essentially the levels of population the growth rates of population and which causes consequent degradation on the environment here this also resulted primarily from a linear thought process to development where many of the externalities of Developmental processes was not really considered for example if you look at the uh human being as a as an entity uh the and the and the kind of resources now we use in terms of energy and power as an entity the amount of carbon dioxide that we breathe out is at least 10 times lower than most of the equipment that we have designed or most of the Technologies we have designed so and when we fill ourselves with a lot of these devices to do the work that we used to do based on the energy input that we got now for the same kind of work that is done the amount of energy on the amount of CO2 that's thrown out to the atmosphere is almost 10 times and this kind of forms the the whole ecosystem and the this kind of forms the whole thought that the ecosystem cannot provide for this kind of a uh pollution this kind of a overutilization however this particular uh route did not worry about these were early days of the sustainability movement the word sustainability itself was not used it was mostly in the context of destruction of the environment and it did really not worry much about the social or the cultural Roots so as we as we started looking at it then sorry the next uh consequent action was on the uh uh resource on the environment Road and this was primarily based on um the deterioration of the environment and it was mainly shared basically you would have heard about the heavy levels of pollution in Los Angeles in the 1970s the photochemical smog and all of that that's what led to the um the multiple uh clean energy acts and the the acts of National Environmental Protection or NEPA National Environmental Protection act U which led to multiple such policies in the future so this is where in the 1972 un Stockholm uh conference on human and environment uh this kind of laid the ground for the environment route here the environment the resource and environment route is primarily based on the premise that human livings are constantly improving the standard of life they are raising and then utilizing more and more of the physical resources and as such we start spending more of the resource Capital by creating these Technologies than what we can replenish in the the time frame that is known to Nature and this is typically depicted as you see in this picture here where you talk about the excess material use then what is required to sustain life and uh of course uh the three regions in the world the United States the European Union and China contribute to more than um um 67% more than 67% of the excess material used and put together with the rest of the world it's about global material use right now is about 74% so here is where uh the whole concept of um overe exploitation and the whole concept of um um resource efficiency started coming in and the narrative changed from in the 197 is from the adequacy of resources to the maintenance of environment quality because people started paying attention to the unintended consequence of utilization of the these resources like burning of fossil fuels and burning of coal in power plants which resulted in creation of the one of the worst environmental air quality issues that the US had seen so this also started creating the social movement around the environment and this led to the creation of what we what was then called as the National Environmental Policy Act and then it has subsequently led mofed into multiple clean air acts across the world but this was one of the Genesis of that story here and U as we started looking at this the the looking at Earth as a closed system so what happened is now you have the resource constrainted act resource constrained um nature of uh development and then you put it on saying that the we have one planet so we really don't have anywhere else to take materials from and we don't have anywhere else to dump the materials so the closed economy concept right so you you are really looking at uh you are really looking at extracting materials and putting it in a degenerate form back into the same environment and then extracting more materials and doing in a in a process that uh depletes the quality and the quantity of good materials that are available and generates a large amount of unusable materials that we discard so this essentially formed the whole concept of the biosphere route where it said Earth is a closed you can imagine Earth to be a closed spaceship where you do not have unlimited resources and you do not have unlimited ability to pollute without consequences so the thought did not only originate ra it actually came up even in the time of Benjamin Franklin which said the scale of change initiated by man is no longer local but Global meaning you cannot confine your activities to a region and assume that treatment of those activities in the region will not affect the globe a classic Awakening also came because of the ozone whole layer in the O the hole in the ozone layer that was detected by utilization of the chlorofluorocarbons and related chemicals that led to uh formation of multiple protocols right it started with the Montreal protocol and then you had the toyoto protocol then you had the Kali amendments and now you have the fgas regulation so refrigerants which really became a boon for agricultural productivity and resource efficiency uh but it it looked at it in a very linear fashion and then that became one of the biggest challenges of that era where it looked started looking at problems that are locally created manifesting globally so what it really meant is economically we may be uh living on our Capital which was what was noted by Alfred lotka in 1924 but this is where the automobile Revolution also started so essentially it became apparent that any systems that we create are a lot more carbon intensive than what we are individually capable and put it together along with the Earth being a close system and you are only degenerating its capacity to provide so it creates this problem of we do not have sufficient uh I would say capability to sustain ourselves so this was the biosphere concept of the biosphere route and here the thought process was we need to identify and work with uh Technologies and system that is capable of continuous regeneration so that's where the whole concept of the reduced reuse recycle and reduce reuse recycle and replace came about in terms of uh the circularity and this is actually one of The Originators of the circular economy movement where you really look at resource constraints and look at how you maximize the utilization of a given resource right from the fuels that you use the materials that you use so with this uh we we have developed a mechanism to understand what is the current footprint of consumption so the whole carbon footprinting and energy footprinting and material footprinting came about and the Earth overshoot days essentially it it talks about what does it take for the earth to regenerate itself and how fast are we depleting so that we will we are borrowing from the future essentially the concept here is as I consume how much of it I'm borrowing from the future so how much of it am I in debt to the future generation so these early Concepts led to the led to the discourse turning towards intergenerational uh sustainability previous to that it was mostly looking at data from the history and looking at the current activities in the current generation but the the discourse on biosphere and the resource utilization and the impact of resource utilization on the Earth's carrying capacity and regeneration capacity led us to development of intergenerational equity so how much am I borrowing from my future and now we have this organization that produces this kind of a graph where you can look at to say uh if everybody in the world were to live like a particular country here let's take the example of say Qatar if everybody in the world were to live like Qatar live like citizens of Qatar how quickly we will run out of the resources and it's it's it's about 42 days as soon as we start the year in 42 days we run out of all the resources uh to live in this world so essentially you are more or less borrowing uh you consuming at at almost 10 times what you should be consuming and so on and you look at the United States which talks about June 1st as the date in which you will run out of resources and if you similarly look at multiple multiple countries you get this idea and this organization tracks this overshoot day and this is again primarily coming from this is primarily coming from a material and a resource uh perspective so this this network is called as the global footprint network uh you may go to their website and you can consider uh putting in data from your own daily lives and see how much how much of footprint you are consuming and it's quite revealing in terms of uh what it produces however uh it is a reasonably simplified version because it does not talk about it does not talk about the access to resources it does not talk about the deprevation of uh the resources and the quality of resources being consumed here so once then you as you identify the reason for uh the crisis that you are phasing in terms of uh the the destruction of the environment and the overc consumption and so on one of the one of the hypothesis that put forward one of the roots of sustainability dialogue was the reason for such degradation is technology and the the whole premise was that technology is inherently dehumanizing there are lots of examples that you see here is that of H Dam and the image on the right is basically uh The Villages that were submerged when H dam was constructed now these came out because of extreme drought in the region where a lot of communities that used to live there that no longer live there and there's now recre area called Lake me that exist but it kind of Echoes with many of the thought process we have when we talk about large scale projects for development where it is dehumanizing so the the uh the the conference in 1972 the stockolm conference in 1972 which talked about Technologies not taking the um entire impact on the ecology essentially it is talking about Technologies not accounting for the externality and this again is the problem with secularity because many times when we use virgin materials we are not fully accounting for the circularity of the materials we are not fully accounting for bringing back the material to its original form hence many times the Virgin materials are quite cheaper a good example is uh plastic right Plastics that we are currently using have been uh it's derived from Petrol Plastics and petroleum the kind of polymer that we derive from them are in a very accessible form whereas when you want to go back and generate the same kind of plastics from current uh generation carbonous material like plants like we talk about plant-based Plastics and bioplastics and so on it is more energy intensive because you have to convert what is there right now it is not in a very intense form and similarly we find the same with energy energy that has been created by the Glo by the nature in millions of years in the form of coal or petroleum is easily accessible and it's a a in a very very intensive form whereas energy that is available from Sun right now is not so intensive and hence it used to be expensive but not anymore but there again we really don't take into account the complete impact of those and the example that I want to give again is the solar system solar PV where we are currently talking about 2 rupees and 2 rupes 50 P per unit of uh PV electricity however what does what it doesn't take into account is what will happen to those panels once it reaches its end of life and this is a new challenge that we are facing because of our linear thinking where at the end of the life of these panels we will have to spend probably close to about uh $25 to $30 per panel to recycle and the materials that could be recycled out of it is worth only about $4 per panel what really means is then who pays for the remainer 25 to 26 because previously the electricity that was generated from those panels and sold to the consumers did did not account for the externality so here is where the concepts further concepts of life cycle analysis that you will learn about in this particular course uh helps you understand and externalize some of those hidden cost and hidden uh challenges now the critic of Technology route coming back to the critic of Technology we do see that technology has enabled a lot of uh growth in economic conditions of the world it has uplifted millions and millions of people people out of poverty it has made life a lot more easier on this planet but it has also caused a lot of challenges like you see in the the Plastics is a great example of irresponsible use of Technology by technology itself may not be a a good or a bad thing it is generally the irresponsible use of technology that creates the problem so there is a beautiful book by EF shoe maker which is called small is beautiful which led to the development of this whole concept of appropriate technology so the tech needs to be gentle appropriate social and culturally relevant so there a lot of people who came out of that school of thought and created uh small scale companies and small scale U um technologies that could support the uh local communities and ecosystems however the challenge has been that given in the in these highly globalized world where all the systems are linear and which does not account for all the costs of the technology the circular economy the concepts defined by Shoemaker and the appropriate Technology Solutions do not scale sufficiently in these communities because of the challenge in terms of maintaining and uh repeating them now the other thing is about utilization of Fairly high amount of energy in the technologies that we use for example since as I said the cost is not appropriately priced in which also leads to a very wasteful utilization of energy uh and and similarly the resources in producing an output that could have done in a far more efficient way this is the this is the philosophy and school of thought uh from Amry loens and the integrative design school where you could potentially produce all of what the world needs with the current infrastructure that we already have if only we are able to reimagine what we really need to consume rather than what we need to generate uh a particular example is human beings right now we we talk about a world of decarbonization however we are almost 80% from fossil derived sources we are essentially the the fertilizer that go in thanks to the hab B process and the large scale up of agricultural production enabled by ammonia from the habb process which converts atmospheric nitrogen and fixes into ammonia that later gets made into Ura is what we consume and what we grow so and all of this ammonia right now comes from fossil sources so essentially we are now 80% fossil about two centuries ago we used to be completely solar because before the generation of the he before the discovery of the Heber B process and the development of modern fertilizers human beings primarily used organic practices crop rotation uh looking at uh regenerative agriculture all of which is now coming back into uh the discourse while we talk about the carbon footprint and the sustainability of our practices so what it really means is technology by itself is good uh technology itself does not have a good or a bad flavor sorry but it is the appropriateness and the consideration of externalities that gives it the bad R so now as a consequence as a consequence of the the the roots that we talked about right we talked about the ecological biosphere and the the we kind of started blaming technology ology as the root cause of all of these challenges they took a route on they took a route which talked about curtailing growth because growth is what is necessitating development of technology and every time a capital is employed on a particular uh development of a particular technology it is expected that the capital needs to be recovered and grown which means more of it is deployed for more and more intensive applications of technology so the classic example started even as as early as 1857 by John Stewart Mill who talked about the challenges and the human cost impacted by development of the steam engine and you can imagine steam engines of those times were not really a very good quality system which threw out a lot of these pollutants and nobody really understood what is likely to be the impact of those pollutants except that it did increase the um cost on humans so do we really need it and this was again later in the uh 1970s when we had the oil shock and the Vietnam War and all of that and the subsequent um uh subsequent growth in the economy really looked at do we really need these growth and what is the limit to this growth and this was espoused in a in a book an article by Meadows in 1972 which later formed the foundations of System Dynamics the approach that was developed by J Forester in which we talked about how to sustain the world economics until 2000 and if the growth is going to be unrestricted and unsustainable what's going to happen to the resources now there were probably good reasons to think that the the world will grow as it was growing because everybody was developing the number of millions of people under poty across the world except the G7 and a few developed countries uh were quite a lot and it was evidently seen that development correlated well with energy consumption and now you can see here this is the graph that is in 2022 you're looking at energy consumption per capita and India is fairly small now you can obviously say the world average is still about four times that of India and China has then grown past and you probably will notice that there is no country that has really grown without access to reliable dependable forms of energy because energy access allows us to improve productivity and improving productivity allows access to better uh time that is available with people and with better time that is available with people allows us to go towards better education and so on which allows then the populations to SL slow down and better access to resources and it's it's a virtuous cycle that is provided by access to energy and when you don't have clean forms of energy it's going to restrict a whole lot of people under that the poverty line and that's also what contributed to India significantly reducing its uh incidence of poverty by providing access to clean cooking fuels clean electricity and so on however the biggest Assumption of this kind of a System Dynamics approach which predicted kind of a Dooms Day for every single um scenario is the assumptions itself the assumptions were quite linear which says I consume an x amount of energy and material per person to grow so that X is going to be scaled if the number of people exploded so it didn't really account for uh changes and assumptions it didn't really account for the S curves that the the society is very well known there has always been S curves of if this was assumed to be this way now you you already know the stories of um The Manhattan being full of HSE manure and it's running out of space to dump the horse manure when it was all horse driven carriages now those problems don't exist anymore and it is now replaced with cars and in future the world population still could still grow without having the attendant problems of what it is so that the opportunity for technology to support this growth is not considered in many of these scenario development and it mostly assumed that the growth must stop and indefinite growth is not physically possible the other thing that was also said is once you stop your attention from focusing on growth which is epitomized by this metric called GDP you then start paying attention to other parameters such as ethics uh social goals happiness and so on and this is when a lot of terms called the happiness index uh Happy Nation surveys and all of that came about so this is again A View that if you do not take your attention from GDP as a metric and grow at all cost as an outcome to something else where you start promoting the holistic de velopment uh it may happen that the populations will start focus on these social parameters however that has really not happened we have not yet found a convincing enough alternative to GDP though GDP is completely flawed because it only talks about the growth output but it really does not talk about the attendant negative or downside so if my country is growing at an x% I'm also generating a y% of negative output which is not considered when you look at GDP as a number and it has shown that once the per capita GDP of a country crosses something Beyond $7,000 you get into a point where um the negative effects actually outperform the positive effects and it does not grow much beyond that and uh the GDP has a metric to grow further beyond that number the attendant impact on the environment at least with the Technologies and with the knoow that we have right now is for higher than far higher than what it is now the consequence of this is we need growth but we don't have the negative uh we should not and we don't need the negative impacts is the school of thought that came saying you can grow but you need this particular uh activity which is reducing the per capita energy consumption and move towards energy conservation and renewable energy now this school of thought was significantly promoted by Amry lens um in his book called the soft energy path and where he argued that very few people would oppose solar energy for what it is and in many forms U it is something that we can agree is fairly clean and we would also probably not oppose Energy Efficiency for what it is now his argument was this whole uh whole choice that people do not have and the whole reason why people stick to their existing um wrong choices is that the people who designed those wrong choices have a lot of um attachment to it and have a lot of what do you call um um lot of challenge in letting that go so there is an inherent inherent U bias towards continuing the status quo and if only people were able to understand that the alternative Which is far higher far higher improvements in Energy Efficiency and far better utilization of Renewables can be considered then we probably can meet all the developmental goals in the no growth scenario in all the uh environmental goals in the no growth scenario while meeting all the growth targets so this is the overall integrative design movement which has had some fair amount of good successes in terms of building energy in terms of improving efficiency of U heating systems and cooling systems but has not found a large amount of application Beyond those uh Beyond those areas now as we as we look at all of these roots one thing that is very common is that uh many of them are looking at the physical plane many of them are looking at the resources that is available and the materials that are being consumed the energy that is being consumed the environment that is being degraded so it's mostly touching upon the physical pre and when we talk about uh when we talk about growth or no growth and all there is an element of humans that come in there it's an element of social systems that come in and this was the uh the seventh or sixth route that came about which is the Eco development route where it said that economy and the environment need not be diversed from each other ecology and the environment and the social good need not be diversed from each other and it can be such that it can grow in harmony this was the Salient features of the Eco development route that was espoused by saxs at all in 1977 here the the the objective was to look at an approach to development aimed at harmonizing social and economic objectives with ecologically sound Management in the spirit of solidarity with future generation now you could see how close this definition or this not even definition this articulation is to the the 1978 bertland commission's report and it is after this the word sustainable came into the uh into the common discussion in uh in in all the discourses after the burland commission's report and it led to the UNP document that first time used the word sustainability in a un document and this also formed the foundations of the future un sdg and you can kind of look at it and understand so broadly these un sdg G kind of looked at form broadly if you really look at it look at Urban Urban squalor or protecting environment or understanding Human Resources uh self-sufficiency hunger conservation of resources improving uh administrative integrities internationalization commitment to environment Al so all of this eradicating of diseases and misery and proliferation of arms and so on all of these kind of evolved into into what we now know as un sdg and if I share the UN sdgs with you you can immediately recognize that this has been and this has been here since 2012 and this has been here since 2012 and now a lot more um kpis or performance indicators have been added to these specific 17 goals uh to make them actionable and track progress to these goals and these goals were said to be um we were set to achieve these goals by 2030 so un progressively developed multiple clean development and multiple development indices there was these Millennium development goals that came about in 2000 which were eventually replaced by the sustainable development goals in 2012 and this did not come about overnight this has come through a lot of um evolution of the thought process uh to a point where we now have indices that govern social good indices that govern environmental and ecological good and IND that govern economic good indices that govern humans and Society so broadly it looks at a holistic development and now we want to understand how this can get into action so as we really look at sustainability now that you have a fair amount of historical overview on sustainability what we want to look at is how do you go from there into sustainability action so let me look at uh how do we at the I medras School of sustainabil ility view that so we look at it as four parts of the problem one is the environment which everyone of us agree and then we also have the resources and energy from a technological perspective we completely agree and most of our early early discussions focused on these two Roots now you start putting at Economic Development the growth and so on as part of it you also bring in the element of social sustainability so if you really look at a true sustainable Society it's at the intersection of all of these four elements and these are sometimes articulated as the three PS which is the people planet and profit which really talk about people the planet and the profit but sometimes you can also uh separate it out the resources and environment because environmental degradation is imminent is in front of you and uh it's part of the planet problem but it is it makes sense to call it out separately as well and then you have the elements of Step stability and stability can come from two forward two fronts one is stability of uh the society in general and that can only come by providing a decent livelihood and providing U opportunities for growth learning and enjoyment at the same time having opportunities for and this cannot happen without the economic development so we see that it is at the intersection of all of these activity that uh sustainability can survive so in a sense uh for sustainable growth grow to happen and sustainable development to happen it needs to consider indicators of all of these four elements at the school itself how we are organized um to handle this we have multiple research centers uh if I were to put it and these research centers can be organized based on the theme that you have the uh environment and the material and resource theme is the natural environment where we are looking at natural systems the ecological systems environmental systems and how do we conserve protect and progress along those directions and then you have the built environment where you looking at materials being processed into something that is adding value so that the economic activity can improve so the activities on construction the energy Consortium which is looking at energy utilization and then you have the Center for Urban and built environment which looking at Societies in general which take care of the um the built environment and then putting all together in terms of the socio technical environment where you're talking about Society where we have the center for technology and policy the robot bar Center which is working on intersection between AI ethics and responsibility of AI and applying that to the problems of uh what we see in sustainability Net Zero and so on now broadly if you really look at these three elements of it that addresses the three people planet and profit where you're looking at um uh the The Profit coming out here the people coming out here the planet coming out here though it is not completely diversed from each other and there the intersection of all of these three where we call us the U The Sweet Spot of sustainability so at I medras we have multiple centers that are working on each of these element but then the school of sustainability as such Works towards putting all of these three together for uh supporting the sustainable development so how do we do that we do that I just want to talk a little bit about the set of um research projects and and what we have here so we have the uh the root of it is dialogue so we have the business model and policy change activity that we want to look at and then once you do that we also need to understand the science part of it so really coming to a conclusion in a in a more reason and thorough way requires us to understand the science that governs the policy and the business models that the science that backs the business model then you have converting science to Solutions which is uh from the technology perspective how do you take forward what you know as fundamentally sound science into products and solutions to the market and then you obviously have uh implementation Focus where a best of Technology if not done well can screw things up we have known this time and time again in terms of uh the resource Reuse Recycling and all of that where everything exists but nothing works so it's about implementation that you need to work at and which again goes back and advises the business model and policy because without tackling all of these problems you really cannot progress on anything so you you need in a sense a a cohesive way of working on all of these together now if I were to dig a Little Deeper on science what do we want to and what do we want to advised by science is trying to build models and scenarios and understand how technology is likely to evolve and how do we bring forward uh bring forward solutions to an anticipated set of problems but then we also Al want to look at Technologies by solutions that we want and decarbonization is an area that we can quite aggressively focus on and then you also have uh the Technologies or science does not exist by itself it exists along with the community so you want to look at the interaction between all of these with the community as such and then put it all together by way of um developing construct so if you had seen the evolution of sustainability so far it has developed through a lot of constructs and now what we want to do at the school of sustainability is to bring in science-based Solutions and there is already a framework where there is a science-based target setting uh or targeted indicators for decarbonization or ESG goals so here we really want to enhance that process by providing the uh industry providing the community with tools that will allow them to do it much better an example of that that we're currently working on is the sustainable coed project where where we are really looking at uh supporting the taminadu government in understanding what does it mean to have a green holistic kedu market and this is integrated with the concepts of net zero this is integrated with the concepts of integrated water it's not just an isolated siloed activity but it's an integrated activity and this is where it goes back to this concept of Integrative design where we want to look at the whole system as such and not really look at individual parts so many many organizations support in the development of these activity and one of them is basically uh the carbon zero challenge that we conduct and there are other organizations such as indust DC which is a venture Studio because many times delivery of solutions also requires building of Industries and building of Ventures so there are many people who are involved in this activity and this is through dialogues and discussions such as the policy dialogues we have that the school of sustainability is geared towards addressing these problems now once we say the school of sustainability is geared towards addressing these problems the next question that we want to address is how do you characterize and how do you measure sustainable development now this is again as much as the problem we had with defining the sustainable principles that we did the next set of problems come in terms of measuring and measuring and tracking progress so going back to our older question uh is when we said we want to do sustainable development naturally we want to understand uh what is to be sustained and what is to be developed so this has a broad amount of agreement now which is now translated into multiple un development goals sustainable development goals but as such we could agree that as a we want to sustain the nature as it is and the components of nature could be Earth the biodiversity the ecosystems and so on so that it is available for future Generations now you can also say what is future Generations future Generations could be the next Generation which is like a 2025 year time frame it can be the next 10 Generations it can be forever and we know that when the time frame is very small everything can be sustained and when the time frame is are very large nothing can be sustained so you here is where the U here is where the challenges particularly come in there are two time kind of time frames that are generally agreed upon which is a 20 25 year time frame and a 100 Year time frame so which is where we talk about intergenerational equity and intergenerational activities now the next thing that we want to sustain are the life support uh solution life support services provided by nature which includes the services of the ecosystem a very good example here is a forestation of uh removed trees now when we have a developmental project where we looking at removing trees and replanting those trees in a different region we are not only only planting tree for a tree what we are kind of removing is an ecosystem so for example if it's a wetland or if it's some kind of a a forest that is being cleared it's an ecosystem that is being removed so it really important to understand the impact of that removal of that ecosystem and the usefulness of the project so it's not to say that we don't want to create any projects but in a sense understanding the uh nature of life support provided by those ecosystems becomes extremely important we also want to ensure that the resources and environment that we depend on is sustained so that you don't get into this problem of depletion of resources what we also want to sustain and this is something that is quite uh um acknowledged these days is the community itself the cultures the groups the places which has historical connotations indigenous communities for example many of the territories in say Australia and other places where they talk about acknowledging the presence of indigenous communities before it became what it is right now so it is important to understand the context as to what uh what the place was before and what it is right now and many times places have large memories so the behaviors and traits that you see in a place could potentially be because of the uh because of the way it has been now this is what is to be sustained and if you want to see what is to be developed of course many times people talk about uh infant mortality Life by life before 5 years and survival of children and then uh of course always increasing life expectancy education Equity equal opportunities it's in terms of people development economy because without economy nothing really runs much so you have looking at wealth creation uh um responsible consumption and the production productive directing wealth and consumption towards productive sectors and then you're also looking at society which is institutions capital state Social Capital the regions and States so this overall archit Ure allows us to Define many of these indices the indices that has been developed to measure states and countries on performance where developed on some of these some of these Frameworks so what what are the common indices that are currently available for us to measure and characterize um the United Nations sdg is something that you're quite familiar so it formed this committee called the commission on sustainable development in 1992 to provide indicators that covers all aspects of sustainable development and then this was then made into many subgroups of consultative groups to provide these indicators and provide validation of these indicators which eventually led to the establishment of the sdgs in the 2012 time frame then you also have the iucn as I said the conservation uh Network which provides the well-being index from time to time and it is it's something that has been on and off now you also have the Environmental Protection environment Al performance index measuring countries so many times what happens is there is also a challenge of quality of data sometimes we do see some countries performing too poorly but they may have end up having a fair amount of high quality U resources that could support sustainable development so we really don't know sometimes uh this data is not very very clear but the objective of these uh um objective of these indices is to provide a framework so that people can talk on the same language and it is also after 1972 in that convention in Stockholm that developing countries also started acknowledging the need for a sustainable development framework prior to that it was mostly that the G7 or the developed world has done their share of damage and they have progressed and the developing world or the global South that it is called right now is still in the process of development so they should be allowed to do but that's where the challenge of uh local problems Global impacts came about so now there is a fair amount of recognition with all the countries that they need to do irres of where their developmental status are and then you have the growth that is going to occur in the future it rather be a green growth or rather be a sustainable growth rather than what it used to be so this is where you're lock looking at indices such as the ecological footprint which gives you the footprint of Nations as I showed you before and then there is also this alternative that came about called the GPI the genuine progress indicator as an alternative to the GDP but it never really took off because it was really hard to measure and as always sustainability indicators are very hard to measure so GDP is easy because it's a a numeric value based on economic output whereas many of these looks at quality of life metrics which may differ based on where people are these all of these five entities or five indices that I talked about are mostly based on physical locations country States regions communities and so on the last one is something that came about for um sustainability reporting of companies because the thought process that evolved is as we as we develop it is mostly the uh Industries and companies that come about that are contributing to part of the problem so it makes sense to also have a reporting initiative on the practices of these companies and this was earlier broadly governed from an environmental perspective through pollution reporting and so on but now there is this framework that is coming up this is called the global reporting initia and then there are many such Frameworks which now forms broadly the category of reporting initiatives that is now forming broadly the ESG reporting so the environmental uh social and governance parameters and we can see where the ESG reporting is coming from a lot of it is from the environmental parameters but the other two the social and governance is also coming from some of the sdg indicators that we are talking about to give you to give you an example of how each each of these this is the Environmental performance index how each of these is measured and varied so you can you can kind of um put together a framework yourself and most Frameworks have some kind of indicators in this case there about 40 indicators which talks about the climate change impact talk about environmental health and the ecosystem sometimes you could also have this is entirely dependent on the environment sometimes you could also have other indicators that talks about governance and social so in a sense this is the 40 indicators in 11 categories that form part of the Epi framework so this if you really look at it there are certain things that you can measure there are certain things that you can't really measure you just have to estimate and in sense for example it very very easy to measure water but it is very hard to measure what is called as the biome protection so it goes into the governance it goes into the uh enforcement of policies and action it goes into the it goes into the uh uh Frameworks which protects endangered ecosystem so this is broadly the framework that is published and hosted at Yale University website where you can go and look at it now going to you can look at it now going to the uh companies itself now what do we what do we have as framework so you have uh so many of them one of the most mature one is called the carbon disclosure project it started out as the carbon disclosure project where companies voluntarily disclose their carbon emission coming from their manufacturing operation and in 2013 uh this became uh CDP as it is known here and it is one of the most popular platforms among uh the globally listed companies to the extent that 2third of all listed companies are part of this reporting platform and the number is almost 2/3 of all companies by market cap the number is close to 23,00 th companies and as per their website CDP collects data on climate change uh water security deforestation and they do it on behalf of investors worldwide and the information provided by the companies on CDP is used by investors to make decisions on and other stakeholders to use decisions on risk and opportunities related to their investment so essentially it it serves as an indicator on sustainable practices of companies through voluntary disclosure mechanism but now most often CDP disclosures are used by large Banks across the world to make certain investment decision the other thing that you see here is the GB so this came about as a form of understanding sustainability of buildings particularly so it's called the global real estate uh sustainability Benchmark is the global real estate sustainability Benchmark yeah so this is an organized iation that provides the sustainability performance indication of the real estate across the world and now essentially it it collects data on the portfolio like the companies large L set companies like black rock and all and reports basically the risk of climate change or the the sustainability index of those uh portfolio in terms of what it is now the Indian framework is called the brsr which is a short for business reporting and sustainability reporting right so the brsr uh essentially reports a much wider range of sustainability activi so the grsb actually assesses performance of real estate and uh in terms of the ESG factors of the uh real estate sector whereas brsr on the other hand covers a broader range of sustainability issues including the environmental social governance aspect of a large range of companies and other it's very similar to the other Global Frameworks like I said it's about the very similar to the gr framework so this kind of gives an indication on the practices of listed companies and in India now brsr is mandated in the top few companies listed in the stock exchange based on market cap and it's currently slowly expanding to other activities now we looked at quite a few things right we started looking at uh what is sustainability we also looked at what uh are the roots of development of sustainable development goals and then we also looked at what is the method and mechanisms for measuring sustainability and Reporting sustainability but we should also pay attention to activities and items that are not considered sustainability one of course the short-term profit maximization if you really would call where you're purely taking decisions based on economics if it is clearly not contributing to long-term sustainability which is not considered sustainability obviously the second and interesting and most important point is considerations of single issue Solutions when I say single issue Solutions you can be either an environmental solution or it can be a social solution or an economic solution so if you don't consider the complete viability on all three aspects the environmental the socioeconomic and the true sustainability requires you to balance all of these three the third thing which obviously now is becoming popular is the term called greenwashing where we are really looking at uh we are really looking at um sustainability being essentially we really looking at superficial or misleading claims in sense it's about U um marketing or it's about providing u a perception of sustainability without really not doing much behind the scenes example could be not having your carbon footprint significantly reduced but talking about having solar panel installed or talking about planting hundreds of trees or de talking about planting a forestation and so on and so forth without actually tackling the core process so uh sustainability starts at home so we really need to look at what we are doing behind our back and then contribute to the societal good as well the third the fourth aspect is not really looking at the social impact here we really talk about things like communities the just Transitions and all but then not focusing on the society without um uh looking at considerations such as human rights labor and all communities wellbeing is an important concept of it the fifth aspect which is linked to the second one is not paying attention to the long-term consequences which in a sense you can try to understand by applying tools such as life cycle analysis or looking at externalities that can be cost but not thinking about it and not the the environmental impact assessments many tools that you will talk about when we uh when we go to the sustainability toolkit in the future chapters but looking at this uh not looking at this is not something that you can uh offord and call call yourself a sustainably minded company but not paying attention to these consequences the last is assuming this to be a fad and not doing anything the business as usual scenario does not apply even if it is not for even if it is not for any great reasons right now being sustainable makes business sense if you want to be profitable if you want to be a growing and developing business if you want to survive in what's happening these days uh paying attention to many of these topics is important so business as usual is not something that will uh support the long-term sustainability of your operations so with that I would just like to close my lecture close this module with a uh a small slide on univers sustainability goals so looking at this slide we understand that it covers multiple aspects so you have the environment aspect you have the resource aspect you have the livelihood aspect so we will dig deeper into this during our case study exercise thank you very much for your time I hope to see you soon in the next module [Music]