Computing for Sustainability

Computing for Sustainability   
January 18th, 2012

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Credit: WikiMedia

Visualising Sustainability

“Sustainable Lens: A visual guide” published by NewSplash available through Amazon in mid-January.

How to convey the essence of sustainability in a few sketched lines?    I’m wading through the net and my bookshelves to find examples of the genre.    I’m looking for schematics of the notion of sustainability itself rather than the underlying science – greenhouse, carbon, meso climate process, ground water,  etc for which there are a zillion diagrams.

The list is not meant to be exhaustive, but if I’ve missed your favourite diagram, leave a link and I’ll add it to the list.   Many of these images are duplicated all over the web, I’ve tried to find original sources (try tineye, is really cool), but again, let me know if I’ve missed something.

In no particular order, here’s 255 I’ve found.

1. Strong Sustainability

“This model recognises that the economy is a subset of society (i.e. it only exists in the context of a society), and that many important aspects of society do not involve economic activity. Similarly, human society and the economic activity with it are totally constrained by the natural systems of our planet” (NZ PCE quoted by Pam Willams (PhD)

2.   OK, so there was a particular order, the strong sustainability circles had to go before the weaker (but much more common) Venn diagram, 3 circles (or triangles)

This model is very very common (google search sustainability Venn).

“There is some common ground where each of the circles converge, but the main priority in this model is the health of the economy. Economists sometimes refer to this as the weak sustainability model ….. it assumes that the degradation of one group of assets, (environmental, social or economic) can be compensated for by improvement in another and that externalities can be externalised (PRISM and Knight, 2000, cited in PCE, 2002). This weak sustainability model fails to acknowledge the ecological constraints that humans, other species, markets, policies and developments must operate within” (NZ PCE quoted by Pam Willams (PhD)

Venn diagrams coming together and showing changing dominance of sectors in a static animation.

Check out the many different visual examples of sustainability at Computing for Sustainability

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