Three Pillars: A Sustainable Development Systems Model

Sustainable development is a systems-thinking problem, not three separate scorecards: environmental health, social equity and economic viability rise and fall together through feedback loops. This simulator renders the three pillars as growing 3D towers linked by particle flows — resource extraction flowing from the environment into the economy, circular-economy recovery flowing back, and social investment flowing from the economy into equity — driven by a coupled logistic stock-flow model. Tune extraction, circularity and social-investment rate and watch a purely GDP-maximising strategy quietly erode the other two pillars, exactly the divergence between GDP and a Genuine Progress Indicator that the article describes.