Nowdays, sustainability is becoming a key word in the development studies and activities in local,national and international level. The growing concern on the sustainability is the impact of environment condition which is more limited to support human life.
The biggest concern of the sustainability is on the environmental sustainability. This topic involves issues that range from history, economics, and sociology to environmental management and engineering. There is no single goal or criterion by which we might judge the sustainability of a given policy because there are competing objectives to achieve: increased efficiency of resource use, reduced risk of harm to humans and the environment, sustained availability of renewable resources such as fisheries and forests, and intergenerational equity in the use of nonrenewable resources.
The one principle that ties all of those aims together is that each generation should bequeath to its successor a combination of natural, social, and economic capital equal to what it inherited. Given the diverse forms that capital, risk and durability take, it will never be possible to formulate a single metric by which to measure sustainability. Instead, we must seek to find ways of understanding sustainability in numerous contexts. (Cebula and Payne, 2014)
According to Becker, sustainability is the acknowledgement of various environmental and cultural diversities that can be transformed into advantages at different geographical scales. Sustainability is the optimization of natural alternatives that each local has in the process of development (Becker, 2002).
The basic concept of sustainability is concerning on (1) the living within the earth’s limits, (2) the understanding the interconnections between economy, society, and environment; and (3) maintaining a fair distribution of resources for this generation and the next.
There is two concepts of sustainability; strong and weak sustainability. It is relating with the question on how man made resources and natural resources interact with the environment. The concept of strong sustainability is about the man made resources and natural resources are COMPLEMENTARY and not SUBSTITUTES of each other. Thus, there needs to be a critical point to be maintained for adequate environmental services.
As Erekson describe on the sustainability that is “Sustainability should be seen as a system whereby economic growth and/or improvements in the quality of life occur in a unified system that is complementary with, rather than antagonistic to, natural capital. It is an agreement to build consensus among political institutions, industries and population towards a dialogue with the stakeholders that represent these subsystems and the result should be a unified system able to maintain a dynamic equilibrium and able to regenerate itself to maintain its viability.” (Erekson et al., 1999)
There are some perspectives in interpretation on the relation between human and the environment, it relates with how human sees the nature. The key issues on sustainability and cconomic development policy are concerning on ecology, society and sustainable development. Ecology includes biodiversity and ecosystem services. Considering the ecology and the human need is the key of the sustainability development, on how society can mantain the biodiversity and ecosystem service for the conservation and economic puposes such as in providing food health and energy. But the exploitation of oil and mining and the exploitation of forest have contibuted to the degradation of environmental quality and biodiversity lost.
Therefore it is needed a treatment of the degradation of the environmental quality and biodiversity lost by landscape management to improve the sustainability of the landscape, in which ecological integrity and basic human needs are currently maintained over generations. (Forman 1995). The landscape management can be implemented through some future scenarios, such as: business as-usual, mosaic farming landscapes, cco-centric or environmental plantings, agri-centric or production oriented and abondened land use. In Indonesia, case, there is a conversion of arable land/native or forest for bioenergy project on the environment problem which is called by “Food-Energy-Environment Trilema”. This project aims to identify the potential of sustaineble biomass production on degraded and marginal land; restoration of degraded land, and suporting rural livelihoods. This project is modeled from the same project in Nepal.
Meanwhile the externalities activities also contributed to the degradation of environment such as water pollution, air pollution, soil pollution. To overcome this externalities, there is three key insights of the economic framework for ecosystem services, they are: 1) the importance of marginal ecosystem service assessments; 2) understanding and investigation of a safe minimum standard level of ecosystem structure and function; 3) the importance of capturing the benefits provided by non-marketed ecosystem services, through some type of institutional arrangement,
The usage of energy in the development also contributes to the environmental problems, such as the usage of the non renewable energy sources which come from the fossil fuels energy and coals. It is the major contributor to greenhouse gas and human-caused climate change. In considering on the problems of energy security there is a growing attention the alternative source of energy, that is renewable energy such as geothermal, solar, and so on. For the long term energy security, it deals with timely investments to supply energy in line with economic development and sustainable environmental needs.
