Sustainability Indicators (SI) are a tool used in an attempt to measure the status of a system for which we have no endogenous terms of success, i.e., "the sustainable state." The primary purpose of SI is to provide a measure for the effectiveness of decisions, both as a measure of previous decisions and as a projection of current decisions into the future. With obvious applications for public and corporate policy, SI are used in a variety of specific contexts that can determine the limit of their applicability in other contexts, i.e., what is a measure of sustainability in one context may not be valid under another context or definition of sustainability. This lesson will take you through some of the historical details in the development of Sustainability Indicators (SI), how SI developed as an integral part of sustainability research, and specifically, how SI are being used to measure the sustainability of cities. 

Learning Objectives

• Provide the arguments for sustainability indicators.
• Identify the challenges to creating comprehensive sustainability indicators.
• Assess the shortcomings of sustainability indicators.
• Present the ethical issues that can emerge from the challenges and shortcomings to sustainability indicators.

What is due for Lesson 7?

This lesson will take us one week to complete. Please refer to the Course Syllabus for specific time frames and due dates. Specific directions for the assignment below can be found within this lesson.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please post them to the General Questions discussion forum (not email), located under the Discussions or the Lesson tab in Canvas. Your instructor will check that discussion forum daily to respond. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you are able to help out another student.

Sustainability Indicators (SIs) emerged for the purposes of Sustainable Development as a product of ecological studies quantifying the value of certain parts of an ecosystem in an attempt to provide policymakers with a system for comparing the potential value or harm of one policy over another, i.e., understanding the trade-offs. SIs also provide decision makers with a means for measuring progress over time (e.g., improvement or decline in the system or part of the system.) A simple example is that pollution levels in water resources could indicate whether certain efforts to regulate those pollutants were effective. However, the measure of pollution levels alone does not indicate whether an action is sustainable. It is only in the context of a broader set of indicators (of parts of the system) that the measure of pollution levels would begin to inform us about the sustainability of an action or set of actions.

Urban systems studies are an area that has seen significant attempts at creating comprehensive sets of Urban SIs, as you will encounter in Chapter 3. Many researchers in sustainability and/or urban studies consider the challenge of making our cities sustainable as the main hurdle to achieving a sustainable society. This is for various reasons, including the projected growth of human populations between now and at least 2100 will be in urban centers, where more than 50% of the world's population currently lives, roughly two-thirds of which are in developing countries. Yet, for all of the projected growth, urban living (per capita) provides the best opportunity for a low-impact lifestyle (e.g., per capita, residents of NYC have the lowest greenhouse gas footprints in the U.S.) This is because of high-density living with efficient and readily available public transportation.

Significant Principles

• Sustainability Indicators (SIs) are used in decision-making processes.
• SIs should not be oversimplified or reductive.
• The use of SIs may or may not be comprehensive enough to capture all of the relevant system interactions.
• There are significant limits to the types of value that can be quantified that ecosystems provide.
• "Ecosystem Services" is a means for capturing the value of certain environmental processes (such as trees processing CO2 and providing O2) for decision makers.
• The selection process of SIs for a project that impacts a wide range of stakeholders ought to have the input of a relevant sample of those stakeholders.

Potential ethical questions for consideration

1. By what processes are SIs determined?
2. Who has input in the determination of SIs, and which SIs will be used in the decision process?
3. Are there rhetorical or dogmatic dimensions to the determination of the SIs?
4. What happens when certain functions cannot be readily quantifiable (such as the cultural significance of a given landscape)? Are they ignored?
5. In what ways can SIs be value-laden?