What is environmental sustainability?

Sustainability, in a general sense, is the capacity to maintain a certain process or state indefinitely. In recent years the concept has been applied more specifically to living organisms and systems. As applied to the human community, sustainability has been expressed as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Given the present level of human numbers, this may be difficult to achieve.

The term has its roots in ecology as the ability of an ecosystem to maintain ecological processes, functions, biodiversity and productivity into the future. To be sustainable, nature?s resources must be used at a rate at which they can be replenished naturally. There is now clear scientific evidence from environmental science that humanity is living unsustainably, and that an unprecedented collective effort is needed to keep human use of natural resources within sustainable limits.