Sustainable development is a concept that describes the social goal of improving and maintaining human wellbeing over a long-term time horizon within the critical limits of life-sustaining ecosystems. This concept is based on a profound appreciation of the interdependence of ecosystem health and sustained human wellbeing. The core principle is that activities that provide for human wellbeing must not undermine the ecological and social processes on which they depend.

The ecological processes on which human life and wellbeing depend are sometimes termed ‘ecosystem services’. These include source, sink, and regulatory services, such as the provisioning of clean water, the assimilation of waste products, and the climate regulation function of the atmosphere. Similarly, the structured interaction between people also provides a flow of services that are fundamental to supporting human life and wellbeing. These include the physical, emotional, and spiritual support provided by families and communities.

Both ecological and social sustaining services are produced outside of the formal economic system of production, trade, and commerce. And yet the economic system, along with all other spheres of society, depends on the continued functioning of these services. Unfortunately, today’s economic systems are organized in a way that systematically undermines these life-sustaining services.

Sustainable development demands rethinking and renewing human activities such that they serve to strengthen rather than undermine ecological and social sustaining services. The posts in this section in particular help to work through the meaning and implications of sustainable development as a key social imperative of the 21st century.