• About ACSI
• Project Charter
• ACSI History
• About Sustainability
• About The Natural Step
• The Atlantic Context
• Contact Information
• Coordinating Organization
• Founding Organizations
• Network Partners
• Steering Committee
• Sustainability Partners

Sustainability : The Global Context

Sustainability is the greatest challenge of our time. The scientific evidence is overwhelming and undeniable: climate change presents very serious global risks, and it demands an urgent global response. Ecosystems around the world are in decline and the ability of the earth to provide life-supporting systems is being systematically eroded.(1) Around the world, one-fifth of the world's population goes to bed hungry on any given night and 1.2 billion people (mostly women) continue to live in abject poverty.(2) Globally, societies are realizing that industrial progress and growth as we have known it has had social, economic, and environmental costs that can no longer be ignored, and that there are ecological and social limits to unchecked growth. The sustainability challenge is about ensuring prosperity and wellbeing for this generation and the generations to come, while living within those limits.

Recent polls show that Canadians have put the environment at the top of their list of priorities. Governments at all levels are debating the best way to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and ensure a healthy environment for future generations. The media has put sustainability on the front pages of newspapers and magazines and public interest has never been stronger. Canadians want action. They want to do the right thing. But the challenge is enormously complex.

Sustainability cannot be achieved by one organization — one company, one municipality, one government — alone. It is a challenge that requires unprecedented collaboration between departments, between sectors, between levels of government, and at all levels of civil society. New organizations and new ways of thinking are needed to allow us to move beyond our own disciplines and areas of expertise to collaborate with others.

Meeting the challenge of sustainability requires systems thinking — examining how different systems are linked to one another, and how our own actions affect those systems; understanding the ways we have undermined the systems that support us; and focusing on how we can address those problems upstream, before they become serious, rather than looking only at impacts downstream.

1. United Nations, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.
2. Oxfam Canada, “Hungry for Change.” Available at www.oxfam.ca/hungryforchange/. Accessed 13 October, 2006.

Back to top