Talk:Sustainability accounting/Archives/2013

Untitled
It is true that sustainability accounting is a relatively new field. However, this article is well referenced with reliable primary sources. It would be a simple matter to add secondary sources if required. It contains valuable material of interest to people in the sustainability field and provides an excellent basis on which future editors can build. Overall Wikipedia would be the poorer without this article. I request that common sense prevail and that the "tags" at the top of the article page be removed. Granitethighs (talk) 21:54, 30 November 2008 (UTC)


 * It appears the article is more of an economic discipline... which is related to economic or money in a context to sustainability. That is not really brought out in the article as written now. Hooking all the U.N. material to the fairly new term Sustainability accounting does not really seem right in context and should be removed. This has very little to do with the U.N.- An economic category could at the least, be added on the bottom of the article. I am guessing that sustainability accounting is more of an economic term than a environmental or sustainability term in general. There are other terms that cover the ideas and issues such as Ecological economics that are directly sustainability related. Some of the issues or most issues connected with Sustainability accounting revolve actual money accounting it looks like in regard then it seems like more an economic term than environmental term in balance. http://www.mindfully.org/Sustainability/Sustainable-Accounting-UNEPDTIE-May02.htm skip sievert (talk) 04:15, 1 December 2008 (UTC)


 * The point is made in the article that "it would be too difficult to list all those methods available at different levels of organisation, so those listed here are at the global level only". Maybe other methods (e.g. ways that individuals can use sustainability accounting to measure whether they are being "sustainable" in their water or energy or food use) can be added later - the problem of scale is really horrendous. The United Nations, whether you and I like it or not, now have a highly sophisticated set of indicators to assess global sustainability in all sorts of ways. In spite of this the article includes all sorts of other global indicators that are not to do with the UN: Ecological Footprint, Environmental Performance Index and Envtl Sustainability Index (Harvard Law School). If you think that the accounting tools listed here are UN-biased then list good, reliable global sustainability accounting tools that are not produced by the UN and not appearing on the given list. That would be really useful editing. The reference to global chemical cycles as sustainability metrics is only obliquely connected to economics.  Your point about the  accounting being more "economic accounting", an "economic discipline" is interesting thanks . I will have to think more about that as I have taken it to be based around essentially environmental factors - but you might be right about its emphasis. Nevertheless, again regardless of our cynicism, the calculations are performed in the name of human sustainability on planet Earth so removing them would be extreme. One factor in all this is that, as you have noted elsewhere, many of the concepts of sustainability are evolving rapidly and the field in general is without a clearly established and defined  terminology. Concepts with different names fuse into one-another to a greater or lesser extent. Over time the terminology and its precision will no doubt improve as sustainability becomes more mainstream. Thanks for your interest Skip. Granitethighs (talk) 05:55, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Possible deletion of article debate
It may be a suggestion on this article to present it for A.F.D. consideration. I am giving some thought to tagging this article with this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion#How_to_list_pages_for_deletion because it appears to be that maybe the article has misconstrued some article titles for a new discipline, with a new name... and it seems the same subject is covered in more actual titles of the sustainability related field. Also the fact that there are three articles that seems to lead in circles to the same information is perhaps an issue, as although these are based on U.N. material mostly... which can be good... it would seem that the actual focus is on the U.N. and not so much the article titles. skip sievert (talk) 07:01, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

The debate
There are three related articles marked as potential "neologisms": sustainability accounting, sustainability science, and sustainability governance. It is true that these are all relatively recent additions to the literature. IMO this is because sustainability as a study is not an established discipline - it is in its embryonic stages and is gradually finding its focus, terminology and scope. In terms of its operations IMO the above three topics are critical - sustainability governance is guided by the evidence provided by sustainability accounting and the whole process is under the critical eye of sustainability science. I am in discussion with an editor in regard to improving the article on sustainability accounting - this simply refers to the quantitative evidence used to assess sustainability (Ecological Footprint and a host of other quantitative tools). There is no universally accepted term for this. One simple way of dealing with this is to call it "sustainability measurement"; other people refer to "sustainability metrics" (there is a Wikipedia entry on this - is it a neologism?) there are others - none has been taken up universally by teh sustainability community. The attraction of "sustainability accounting" is that it captures the close way we manage our economic lives and is therefore an excellent marketing tool for the concept - it is certainly a good contender because it is well established in the literature. "Sustainability governance" is also well established in the literature but not universally accepted - it is simply the process whereby sustainability decisions get implemented - call it suistainability management or sustainability administration if you like. "Governance" is generally taken to include informal decision-making (like deciding to rade a bicycle to work to reduce emissions) so it captures this side of the process, as well as the formal political process. "Sustainability science" is the formal academic analytic and critical appraisal of all aspects of sustainability. It is a newish discipline but formally recognised as a specific "field", for example, at Harvard. IMO there are no unequivocal or unambiguous expressions covering these three concepts - if any of them is deleted or subsumed then very important operational concepts are lost.

So where does that leave us? All these articles are well referenced with reliable primary sources. It would be a simple matter to add secondary sources if required. They contain valuable material of interest to people in the sustainability field and provide an excellent basis on which future editors can build. Overall Wikipedia would be the poorer without this article. In settling issues to do with neologisms Wikipedia calls for common sense to prevail. I suggest that unless and until alternative convincing "terms" are found, the "tags" at the top of the article page should be removed. Granitethighs (talk) 21:56, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Sustainability accounting appears to be a kind of economic article. It is mostly promoted by some accounting professionals on websites. Sustainability governance seems to be mostly a U.N. generated construct which is not a thing unto itself in the real world. Sustainability science is a new term that is being used and is not yet an autonomous field or discipline, but rather a vibrant arena that is bringing together scholarship and practice, global and local perspectives from north and south, and disciplines across the natural and social sciences, engineering, and medicine [2] — it can be usefully thought of as neither ‘‘basic’’ nor ‘‘applied’’ research. It is a field defined by the problems it addresses rather than by the disciplines it employs; it serves the need for advancing both knowledge and action by creating a dynamic bridge between the two. This is according to the article presently. Also as commented on before mostly these three what appear to be walled garden articles all turn around and within themselves mostly as U.N. sourced material seems to be almost the entire jumping off point... even when U.N. material is being mined to make a case for these three articles... mostly the information in the articles is more immediately understood and referenced from mainstream ideas as to mainstream disciplines such as Ecological economics .. Environmental economics .. Environmental science etc. skip sievert (talk) 02:06, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Continued debate
Discussion continued at sustainability science.Granitethighs (talk) 07:27, 4 December 2008 (UTC)