Sustainable Industrialisation

Sustainable industrialisation (SI) is a process of development that strives to promote economic growth through increased capacity to produce goods and provide services whilst improving all peoples’ livelihoods without compromising the needs of future generations.

Whilst there is a need for the adoption of new technology and retooling in the industrialised societies of the west, the emerging market economies such as China and India provide a greater opportunity. This opportunity to address in midstream the sustainability of their industrialisation process allows us to target new and emerging solutions or technologies that positively impact economic growth while also addressing its threats. Examples of benefits provided through such solutions or technologies include:

• protecting the environment on which their continued growth depends,
• reducing the impact of social pressures that occur in an industrialising society,
• improving the administration and management of changes resulting from industrialisation at either the company or government level, and
• leapfrogging potentially harmful short term progress.

In China, the legacy of almost half a century of heavy central planning together with massive population pressures, rapid economic growth, chronic poverty, subsidized energy prices, cheap subsidized credit, widespread coal use, outdated industrial machinery and a lax environmental protection regime have contributed to serious environmental, social and structural stress.

Since Deng set China on a course toward market-style growth in the 1970s, rapid industrialisation and urbanisation have indeed lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty and made the country the world’s largest producer of consumer goods. In the past 20 years, the country has added about $2 trillion to world GDP and created 120 million new jobs. Its rapid expansion and unprecedented rates of industrialisation are now a driving force in the global economy.