Sustainability is a new way of thinking about an age-old concern: ensuring that our children and grandchildren inherit a tomorrow that is at least as good as today, preferably better.
Source: US Environmental Protection Agency
In the mid-1980s, the UN General Assembly established the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) to address growing concern about “the accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural resources and the consequences of that deterioration for economic and social development.”
A few years later, the WCED articulated what today is a widely accepted definition of sustainability: “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Source: Wikipedia