What is sustainable development? An attempt to interpret it as a soliton-like phenomenon

Abstract An attempt is made to establish a relation between the question of what ‘sustainable development’ means and the non-linear theory of shock waves. Despite the presence of dispersive, i.e. entropy-producing, forces a soliton-like, isentropic, transport of a wilfully desired distribution in a field of traded commodities is possible. Starting with the classical Korteweg de Vries (KdV) equation, two other examples, a sigmoidal and a Gaussian soliton in a diffusional environment, are analyzed in detail as a guide-line of how a ‘sustainable’ transport of an economically defined creation can be carried through time.