How can we talk about sustainability standards in a clear, simple language? Here is a thumbnail sketch of the way the technical story of sustainability standards can be conveyed to non-technical audiences, using the language proposed on this site.
Choosing Sustainability
Sustainability standards are about sustainability. Sustainability is about people, and the planet. It is about how we behave towards people today – people in our local community, of course, but also people in other countries.
Sustainability means treating people fairly: doing as we would be done by. It’s also about thinking about the future. There’s only one planet, and we all have to live on it. We depend on it in all sorts of ways, and our children and grandchildren are going to have to depend on it too. We have to make sure that the world we pass on to future generations lets them live their lives at least as well as we live ours. We do not want them to look back at us, and be asking why we ruined the planet on which they have to live. We do not want them to have to clean the mess we have left behind.
And we have choices to make. We need to find ways to balance our needs and the needs of others. Treating people fairly means letting people speak for themselves. We have to make sure that people have the opportunity to make themselves heard, and to influence the decisions that will affect all of our futures.
Today’s global economy is not sustainable. It does not recognize the ways in which we and future generations depend on the planet. It does not treat people fairly. In fact it sometimes feels as if the whole economic system is out of control. There are seven billion of us living today, and in the next few decades there will be billions more. As a global community we are heading for trouble. We need to find a better way.
Finding the Way towards Sustainability
This world is also a complicated place. Finding a sustainable way for ten billion people to live together on one planet is a massive challenge. It means finding a way to make the global economy work better. It means working at all scales, from the local to the global. It means working with markets, and it means working with people. It means engaging with businesses, and engaging with governments.
Sustainability standards can help us find our way through this complexity. They can provide guidance for businesses that want to do the right thing, but are not sure how. Once a standard exists, it can be used by everybody – it provides shared points of reference, a common sense of direction. They are like maps that everyone can use. Some maps will cover wide areas, others will be very local. Some will include a wide range of features others will focus only on features of particular interest. There will be official maps and unofficial maps – what matters, is that they show us the right way to go and that they help us reach our destination safely.
Filters We Can Trust
Of course, we don’t want to have to use maps all of the time. Most of us, most of the time, just want to know that we’re not lost (or at least that the person who’s telling us the way is not lost). We want to know that the bus driver knows the right route, and we don’t want to have to show them ourselves. That’s their job, after all. We want standards to make our lives simpler and easier, not more complicated. We want to know that other people are on the right path, not spend our lives navigating for them.
And so standards systems have a second role: standards help show the way, but we also want to know that they’ve been followed. If there’s a good system in place, we want it to work like a filter, or a screen. We know that behind the scenes there may be a lot of complexity, but by the time we are involved we want to feel confident that the work has been done, not to have to check it ourselves.
This is the ultimate aim of standards systems. If we see a public fountain, we expect the water to be clean. We do not expect to have to choose between clean and dirty drinking water.
The same with sustainability. We can acknowledge that achieving sustainability is complicated, and difficult to achieve. We can acknowledge that we don’t always know how best to achieve it, and that there are different routes to reaching it.
To see this Narrative in action, check out the demonstration site Sustainability Standards 101.
