The document discusses sustainability and sustainable practices for businesses. It defines sustainability as meeting present needs without compromising future generations' ability to meet their own needs. Strong sustainability embraces renewable energy, treats waste as a resource, and values diversity and ecosystem resilience. Key aspects of strong sustainability are systems thinking, a principled definition, and backcasting to understand sustainability and practice it effectively.

1. What is Sustainability? How do businesses use sustainable practice?

3. Defining sustainability Strong Sustainability Used under creative commons licence Environment Society Economy

5. A New Zealand definition Source: New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage, Cultural well-being and local government , Report 1, 2006 The Four Well-beings of Community Sustainability Local Govt Act 2002

7. There are many ways of communicating what sustainable practice is… However what is most important is to understand the connectedness of each of these areas.

9. Lost in the details

10. We must work within the natural cycles

12. The System Conditions In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing … 1. concentrations of substances from the Earth’s crust 2. concentrations of substances produced by society 3. degradation by physical means and in that society, people are not subject to conditions that systematically … 4. undermine their capacity to meet their needs. Copyright © The Natural Step