Sustainability can be summarised as: 'enough, for all, forever'.
All human beings need enough food, water, heating, electricity and other essential resources, demands for which impact significantly on our planet's precious ecosystems.
To meet these demands without further damaging the natural world, we need to become far more efficient in the way we use resources.
Ultimately sustainability is about justice: ensuring a fair share of resources for everyone today and in future generations, throughout our cities and across the world. And this justice must extend to non-human beings too.
Drawing on Newcastle University’s world-leading expertise in the fields of natural and urban environments, agriculture, transport, water, energy, marine technology and clean industrial production, the Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability has been established to develop innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems.
Many of these solutions will be implemented for the first time in our home city, helping to maintain the status of NewcastleGateshead as the most sustainable of the UK’s twenty largest cities – as recognised by the influential organisation Forum for the Future in November 2009. We will achieve this impact through our activities as a lead partner in Newcastle Science City, which aims to ensure the city benefits socially and economically from the science and engineering research undertaken here.