Innovation and Sustainable Development: A Bioeconomic Perspective

Sustainability is a relationship, or balancing act, between many factors (social, environmental and economic realities and constraints) that are constantly changing (Munasinghe & McNeely, 1995; Pirages, 1994). Ensuring sustainability over time means maintaining a dynamic balance among a growing human population and its demands, the changing capabilities of the physical environment to absorb the wastes of human activity, the changing possibilities opened up by new knowledge and technological changes and the values, aspirations and institutions that channel human behaviour. Thus, visions of a sustainable world must naturally change in response to shifts in any part of this dynamic relationship (Pirages, 1994).