Sunday 4 November 2007

What does sustainability mean?

Key objective:
  • To understand and be able to define the term 'sustainable development'.
We played a game of jenga before thinking about sustainability, but changed the rules slightly! You had to remove the blocks and not replace them on the tower. This was to simulate what happens when logging happens in the rainforest and trees are not replaced.
The towers soon fell down - you couldn't keep playing the game forever. It was not sustainable.

So, to our definition of sustainable development...

Sustainable development is development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainable development attempts to minimise the negative impacts of development by considering the needs of both the environment and future generations of people.

In other words, this means growing enough food and sourcing our energy and raw material needs without doing irreversible damage to the environment. Sustainable development is environmentally responsible - it does not waste resources.

You must learn this definition - it is a common 2 mark exam question!

The video below is from DEFRA - it considers what sustainable development means and gives some examples of the way in which DEFRA are implemeting sustainable projects in the UK, including The National Forest.



To play online Jenga, click on the picture below.

2 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Alpha said...

So basically it means to keep developing or increasing amount of usage of something e.g. oil, without making the lives of our future generation worse, so for example, if we use up all the non-renewable energy sources in the world then our children, in the future, will suffer from lack of power.