Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

The elders are challenging the -S- word

As you all well know, Sustainability is term that was originated in the Brundtland report almost 30 years ago in. The report stated that: “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'. Let us now take a closer look at those future generations really are.

We all instinctively correlate the future with new, innocent and beautiful babies, children playing around, school kids learning how to read and write and adolescents making their first steps in real life. But, did we ever think that the real future generations are probably our parents and our granny and grandpa ?

The world is getting older by the day and the supporting facts are mounting. According to WHO, the number of people aged 60 years or older will rise from 900 million to 2 billion between 2015 and 2050 (moving from 12% to 22% of the total global population). Here is another one, now as a graph from The World Bank. Hope you can see the numbers - they are saying that the percentage of elders (+65) in the global population is rising steadily and is now at 8% (starting at 5.5% at the beginning of the 60's. The not-surprisingly interesting aspects is that as the socioeconomic situation of communities is getting better, so is the population getting older.

What does the future hold - no need for complicated projections. We are all here to stay for a along long (long) time. So... getting back to the S word and the theme of the future generations, you probably got the point by now.

In the recent James Lovelock's book: 'A rough Guide To The Future' (Lovelock, J., 2014) sustainable development was depicted as a political compromise between the UN and leaders of the business sector in light of the drafting of 'Our Common Future' report. The S word was accompanied with the D word, which is purely capitalistic by nature. But is seems that nature is having the upper hand these days (demographically and naturally) and thus the business sector must realign itself to the real global challenges.

(The post was inspired by Prof. Israel Doron speech at the 4th Retirement Convention held in Israel, June 2016)

Liad Ortar

Liad Ortar is the founder of the Corporate Social Responsibility Institute (CSRI)in Israel http://en.csri.org.il/