What is Sustainability?

Sustainability is an aspect of how we choose to live our lives in the world. Individuals make choices to live sustainably when they choose housing and transportation options that use renewable resources and do not pollute the environment, when they choose to eat locally-grown, organic foods, and when they choose to moderate their consumption to ensure there are enough resources for others. Similarly, organizations make policy choices on how they operate that impact the enivronment, their employees, their customers, their shareholders, and society at large.

Organizational sustainability is about making policy choices to ensure that organizations are able to continue their operations over the long term without depleting resources, polluting the enivronment, destroying competition, and hurting society. There are several frameworks for understanding the sustainability of countries such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, derrived from the UN Global Compact, and the GAP Frame that translates the UN SDGs into an assessment model. The ISC has combined this work with original research to develop the first model for assessing the sustainability of organizations.