Weak and Strong Sustainability

Sustainability could be divided into two categories: weak and strong sustainability. Weak sustainability assumes that everything is substitutable and assumes that total capital stock should be non-decreasing, so the contributions of the natural world to economic production (‘natural capital’) and to manufactured capital are substitutable. Strong sustainability focuses on keeping the resource stock constant over time and focuses on the optimal scale of economic activity. There are some criticisms of both. Weak sustainability only depends on labor and reproducible capital and fails to consider the necessity land and resources, thereby causing it to be probably be feasible for just the short-term. As for strong sustainability, it focuses too much on economics and the market. However, in comparison to weak sustainability, strong sustainability would be feasible for a longer time period.