I recently attended the “Sustainable Infrastructure and Asset Management” Conference hosted by the Australian Water Association, and would like to congratulate the organisers for an enjoyable and excellent networking event.
Sustainability was defined in many ways by the presenters and participants. So what is sustainability, and how does it interrelate with asset management?
Achieving sustainability will enable the Earth to continue supporting human life as we know it. “Blue Marble” NASA composite images: 2001 (left), 2002 (right). (Wikipedia)
SustainabilityFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Sustainability is the capacity to endure. In ecology, the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems. For humans, sustainability is the potential for long-term maintenance of well being, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions. The word sustainability is derived from the Latin sustinere (tenere, to hold; sus, up). Dictionaries provide more than ten meanings for sustain, the main ones being to “maintain”, “support”, or “endure”.[4][5] However, since the 1980s sustainability has been used more in the sense of human sustainability on planet Earth and this has resulted in the most widely quoted definition of sustainability and sustainable development, that of the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations on March 20, 1987: “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”[6][7] |
The Institute of Public Works Engineering have, in their position paper on “SUSTAINABILITY IN SERVICE PROVISION” (http://www.ipwea.org.au/nams/upload/PP2.pdf), suggested that this view of sustainability be adopted, and therefore considered part of the triple bottom line, but that people operating in different parts of a business or organisation – such as physical asset management, financial management, customers – will have different and narrower definitions of sustainability.
The emerging ISO standard on asset management has a draft definition of asset management as “systematic and coordinated activities and practices through which an organization optimally and sustainably manages its assets and asset systems, their associated performance, risks and expenditures over their life cycles for the purpose of achieving its organizational strategic plan”
Picture this scenario. A company wishes to build an asset, and operate to failure. This choice will provide the best return to shareholders. The community may not regard this as sustainable.
So, should asset management ensure sustainability?
And, as Peter Kohler asked in his article in Climate Control News in January 2010 “Should Asset Managers now be required to include a global context when considering the release of energy, not only from asset failures, but also as part of design?”. Read Peter’s full article here.