From Risk Management to Sustainability: in Theory and in Practice

Environmental risk management for years has allowed interventions, which depended on understanding and quantification of risk.  Sustainability now is superseding various earlier risk management approaches such as waste treatment, waste minimization, pollution prevention, and design for environment. Industrial, and government entities at state, city, and municipal levels, have espoused the principles of sustainability in implementing development and growth agenda. Approaches vary but all use criteria, indicators and metrics to determine favorable sustainability outcomes.  There is still much subjective judgment in these determinations, despite attempts to quantify such assessments.  Of the three sustainability domains, industry struggles with quantifying societal impacts or benefits, especially at the product and process levels.  Lack of transparency from one to another company is a significant barrier to researchers for building a uniform framework and acceptable set of metrics for quantifying the sustainability state of products and processes.  At the level of the corporation, much public reporting is now available.  But that sort of reporting, while it is important for public relations, has little research value. In practice, the technical actions to improve the environmental stewardship for products and processes have moved not far from traditional yet locally effective approaches of risk management.  Sustainability being an inherently multidisciplinary idea, only integrative approaches that use life cycle thinking in technical enquiry and data gathering will move us to a better position to judge sustainability of products and processes.