The Gap Between Measuring and Managing Sustainability

Bich Ha Nguyen

Dai Nam University, Hanoi, Vietnam

*Contact: hanb@dainam.edu.vn

31-05-2026

© Wix

For decades, sustainability has often been framed as a competition to become "less bad" (Chandrakumar & McLaren, 2018; Andersen et al., 2024)

A car that emits less carbon than another. A factory that uses less energy. A product that generates less waste. These improvements matter, and they have helped reduce environmental impacts in many sectors.

But what if being less harmful is no longer enough?

A growing body of research suggests that humanity may need a fundamental shift in how it understands sustainability (Meramo et al., 2024). Rather than asking which option is greener, researchers are increasingly asking a more difficult question: Is it sustainable enough to operate within the Earth's limits?

This distinction lies at the heart of a concept known as Absolute Sustainability.

Traditional approaches largely focus on relative sustainability. They compare alternatives and seek incremental improvements. An electric vehicle may be preferable to a gasoline-powered car. A more efficient appliance may consume less electricity. Yet such comparisons do not answer a crucial question: whether the total level of human activity remains within the planet's carrying capacity.

Absolute Sustainability starts from a different premise. Earth has biophysical limits. Climate systems, freshwater resources, biodiversity, land use, and other planetary processes can absorb only so much pressure before they become unstable. The goal is therefore not merely to reduce harm, but to ensure that human activities remain within a safe operating space (Acevedo et al., 2026).

A recent systematic review found that researchers have become increasingly sophisticated at calculating these limits. Scientists can now estimate environmental budgets and allocate them across sectors, products, and societies. Yet a major problem remains.

The knowledge is not translating into action.

The review identifies a significant "translation gap" between top-down environmental limits and bottom-up decisions made by engineers, industries, consumers, and policymakers. In other words, humanity is becoming better at mapping the boundaries of the Earth system, but not necessarily better at living within them.

The issue may lie in the ability to understand the complex interactions of natural systems, recognize humanity's place within them, and align decisions with ecological realities, which requires more than mere awareness of planetary boundaries. It requires seeing human societies and economies as embedded within nature rather than separate from it.

The challenge of sustainability resembles a household budget. Imagine a family carefully calculating its monthly income and expenses. The calculations may be perfectly accurate. Yet if family members continue spending beyond their means, the budget eventually collapses.

Similarly, planetary boundaries provide a budget for humanity. The problem is not that we lack calculations. The problem is that societies often continue treating ecological limits as negotiable.

This tendency can be seen in the pursuit of eco-efficiency. Technological innovations frequently allow us to do more with less. However, when total consumption continues to expand, efficiency gains are often cancelled by growing demand. The result is a paradox: products become greener while overall environmental pressure continues to rise (Nguyen, 2026).

Thus, sustainability cannot rely solely on better technologies. It also requires sufficiency—an understanding of how much is enough.

Absolute Sustainability may not be a technological challenge as much as a cultural one. Humanity already possesses increasingly precise maps of the Earth's limits. The question is whether we possess the ecological wisdom to follow them (Vuong, 2025; Khuc & Nguyen, 2026).

References

Acevedo, L. I., Pigosso, D. C.A., & McAloone, T. C. (2026). Understanding a new emerging philosophy: Absolute Sustainability. Sustainable Production and Consumption, 66, 74-91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spc.2026.04.010

Andersen, S. C., et al. (2024). Ten questions concerning absolute sustainability in the built environment. Building and Environment, 251, 111220. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2024.111220

Chandrakumar, C., & McLaren, S. J. (2018). Towards a comprehensive absolute sustainability assessment method for effective earth system governance: defining key environmental indicators using an enhanced-DPSIR framework. Ecological Indicators, 90, 577-583. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2018.03.063

Hauschild, M. Z. (2015). Better – but is it good enough? On the need to consider both eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness to gauge industrial sustainability. Procedia CIRP, 29, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procir.2015.02.126

Khuc, V. Q., & Nguyen, M. H. (2026). Cultural Additivity Theory. Available at SSRN 6767760. https://ssrn.com/abstract=6767760 

Meramo, S., Pasutto, E., & Sukumara, S. (2024). Automating relative and absolute environmental sustainability assessments of bio-based products. Bioresource Technology, 394, 130196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biortech.2023.130196

Nguyen, M.-H. (2026). Ayn Rand and Kingfisher on zero-carbon bombs and a sustainable future. Visions for Sustainability, 25(13474), 1-13. http://dx.doi.org/10.13135/2384-8677/13474  

Rockström, J., et al. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461(7263), 472-475. https://doi.org/10.1038/461472a 

Vuong, Q. H. (2025). Wild Wise Weird. AISDL. https://books.google.com/books?id=C5dDEQAAQBAJ