Course Outlines and Lecture 1

Sustainability in Engineering Management – EM854

INSTRUCTOR
DR. SHAHBAZ ABBAS
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Faculty Profile

Course Information
Contents
Pillars of Sustainability

SDGs

Key Concepts

Dr. Shahbaz Abbas

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Faculty Profile

Name: Dr. Shahbaz Abbas, Assistant Professor, DEM

Qualifications:
 Postdoc Industrial Sustainability - PSU Thailand
 Joint PhD in Sustainability - PSU Thailand, CYCU Taiwan
 MS Engineering Management - CUST Islamabad
 BS Electronic Engineering – MAJU Islamabad
Experience:
5 years experience as a Lecturer at CUST Islamabad
Contact: s.abbas@ceme.nust.edu.pk

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Research Areas

 Sustainability, Circular Economy, Technology Management,

Energy Modelling

 Enrolled MS Students : 4

 Enrolled PhD Students: 4

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History of Sustainable Development

 The Brundtland Report

 The first explicit reference to sustainable development can be found in the report
“Our Common Future” published in 1987 as an outcome of the World Commission
on Environment and Development, tasked by the United Nations on formulate a global
agenda for change by identifying sustainability problems worldwide, raising
awareness, and suggesting solutions. This is often referred to as the “Brundtland
report” as the work was led by Gro Harlem Brundtland as Chair of the Commission.
 The report is widely available on the Internet. A copy can be found at:
 https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pd
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Course Information and Assessement

 Enrollment Code: 568023947

 EM854 – Sustainability in Engineering Management – 3 Credit Hours
 4 Quizzes – 10%
 2 Assignments (Pre and post mid term) – 5%
 Project – 10%
 Mid Term – 30%
 Final 45%

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Pillars of Economy Society

Sustainability

Environment

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Mickey Mouse Model vs. Nested
Sustainability Model

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Weak and Strong Sustainability

 Weak Sustainability
 Weak sustainability is built around growth, economic growth, and human welfare
as science and instrumental value to nature, and assumes that nature can be substitute, at
least partially by other forms of capital.

 Strong Sustainability
 Strong sustainability, on the other hand, is built around nature, a size and intrinsic value to
nature, and highlights our human obligations to nature

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Sustainable Development vs. Sustainability

 Sustainable Development
 Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability
of future generations to meet their own needs.
 Sustainability
 Meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs.
 Sustainable development is path towards sustainability

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Sustainable Development Goals - SDGs

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SDGs - Agenda 2030 for Sustainable
Development

 If you look at the UN resolution and the later documents, you can see that each of the SDGs is broken
down into specific targets with related indicators that will allow countries to monitor the progress towards
a specific goals

 Achieving the goals, setting the agenda 2030 will require efforts at all levels, international, national,
regional, and local levels.

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SDG Strengths

 They acknowledged the links between economic, social, and environmental sustainability.

 They implicitly adopt the strong sustainability approach.

 They are applicable both to the global North and to the global South

 They can be operationalized by measuring and monitoring.

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SDGs Weaknesses

 Breaking down into individual goals, we are losing the grand vision of the Brundtland Report.

 The SDGs hardly deal with the issues of trade-offs, that is, for example, improving one SDG may worsen another
SDG.

 Some of the targets lack comparable unreliable indicators at different scales

 One could argue that they are not equally important. For example, if we think in terms of the nested models, some
SDGs could be considered a function of further SDGs. This is only one of the many possible ways of analyzing and
interpreting data dependencies between SDGs.

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SDGs Wedding Cake

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Key Concepts
Social-Ecological Resilience
of Systems

Sustainability

Tipping Point

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Social-Ecological Systems

 Ecosystem Services – Natural resources benefits to humans

 We are fundamentally linked to the natural world. 

We affect and are affected by it

 The first person to introduce the concept of social-ecological

 system was Eleonor Ostrom in 2009. 

 Social-ecological systems are linked systems of people and

nature.

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SES Example

 Forest 

 On the one hand, we will have the ecological system. A forest. 

 We'll have the individual resource units, which are the trees. 

 On the other hand, we have the social systems, individual users like us, who set the rules to use and
enjoy the forest. That is the forest governance systems

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SES Characteristics

 Critical resources and their interactions

 The interactions within the ecological system and within the social system, and the linkages between
the social and the ecological system.
 Multiscale systems
 Measuring impact from multiple angels
 Intergenerational
 Existence time period
 Complex adaptive systems
 Subject to both gradual and abrupt changes. Systems have multiple external and internal interactions 
and equilibriums and that generally social-ecological systems  are able to absorb certain amount of shots.
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Resilience

 The amount of disturbance that a system can withstand without altering self-organized processes and
structures
 Ability to become strong again if something bad happens

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Resilience – Tipping Point

 Social-ecological systems are able to absorb certain

amount of shocks.
 This is usually represented as the cup and the ball.
 The ball represents the social-ecological system.
 The cup, the space in which the system can absorb shocks
without fundamentally changing its nature.
 The capacity of the system to bounce within the cup and
return to an equilibrium without fundamentally changing
its nature is called resilience.

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Resilience - Tipping Point

 There could be instances in which the system is not able to

absorb the shock
 Either because the shock is too large or because the context
has changed it.
 In those instances, there is a risk that the socio-ecological system
would go over the cup border, the so-called tipping point, and
reach a different point of equilibrium.
 In this new cup, the system has usually different characteristics.

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Example – Negative Tipping Point

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Example - Positive Tipping Point

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