Page 57 - Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

Triple bottom line, sustainability and sustainability assessment, an overview 51

is a methodology “that can help decision-makers and policy-makers decide
what actions they should take and should not take in an attempt to make
society more sustainable” (Devuyst, 2001, p. 9). In this context, the
so-called triple bottom line is an accounting framework with three parts:
social, environmental (or ecological), and economic.
However, as mentioned before, other dimension of sustainability may be
considered (such as institutional and cultural) and different approaches to
sustainability assessment have been developed over time.
One of the main consequences of having multiple perspectives in sus-
tainability affects the definition and the assessment of the different capitals
(natural, social, and economic). This implies two basic approaches to sustain-
ability: strong and weak. Strong sustainability is based on the condition that
some natural capital provides functions that are not substitutable by man-
made capital: each capital needs to be preserved for future generation. Weak
sustainability reflects a view whereby natural and man-made capital together
comprise total capital; natural capital is considered to be substitutable for
man-made capital and weak sustainability occurs whereby the level of total
capital passed onto future generations does not decrease (the inference being
that man-made capital has replaced natural capital to maintain total capital)
(Pearce et al., 1994).
Besides, in recent years also the categorization of capitals has been
extended. For example, Porritt (2007) has developed a five capitals frame-
work (natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial) in which the
capitals are not purely of instrumental value but they represent an appropri-
ate framework within which particular endpoints of intrinsic value can be
identified.
Furthermore, there is another level of complexity when addressing dif-
ferent capitals and associated values: some of them may be globally recog-
nized (such as the thermodynamics underpinning chemical and physical
process), other with very specific, local/regional values and meanings (such
as the concept of well-being, if developed and developing countries, with
different context and culture, are compared) (Sala et al., 2013a). This leads
not only to ontological but also methodological challenges in capital’s
evaluation.
The debate over sustainable development has led to defining a new dis-
cipline: Sustainability Science (SS). SS is considered an emerging discipline,
applicative and solution-oriented, whose aim is to handle environmental,
social, and economic issues in light of cultural, historic, and institutional per-
spectives. The challenges of the discipline are not only related to better