Sustainability: What Does it Mean?
Getting out there to talk about sustainability in media tech has been a learning experience. Of course, and as I noted in last week’s blog post, I am learning tons about what organizations are thinking about as it relates to their sustainability plans. The variety of thought and planning is an important reason why I am in this space.
One of the most interesting things is that the baseline knowledge of what sustainability means is very uneven. Like any new concept (and I mean new to our industry, not in general terms), there are a few people who understand the definitions of this topic, but there are many more who only understand what they may be hearing in mainstream media. So, I thought it would be useful to begin creating a glossary of terms and other resources that will help media tech understand what all the bits and bobs mean. I will continue to add to this resource list as new research presents itself or as things evolve. You’ll want to bookmark this page for future reference.
Walking the NAB Show floor and meeting with prospective clients, one question came up quite a bit. “What do you mean by sustainability?” So, let’s start with understanding what the term sustainability means. We use the term in several ways and so it’s important that we understand the scope of it. The Oxford Dictionary defines sustainability as the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level. Ironically, this strict definition is not exactly what we mean when we talk about ensuring long-term environmental growth. We don’t want to maintain our current rate, rather we want to improve our situation! Nevertheless, it’s been taken as the term of art. But Oxford also defines the term “sustainability” as the avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance, which is more in line with what we think of in terms of the environment.
But sustainability is not just about our environmental state. According to the UN, sustainability covers off three domains. In addition to the environment, it also includes social and economic dimensions. In fact, when you look at the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals (also known as the SDG’s), you’ll see 17 goals that cover the three dimensions, not just the environment, but things such as reducing poverty and hunger, gender equality and quality education. The point is that when we really can’t look at environmental sustainability without understanding its impact on social and economic concerns. After all, without a balanced social and economic network, environmental sustainability will be elusive. It is the people who make this all happen.
For my work in media tech, that means that in addition to working on reducing the carbon footprint from our industry, I also want to look at the intersection with diversity initiatives.Increasing the number of women and people of color to our industry will play an important part in increasing its ongoing sustainability.
