What makes a good sustainability indicator

Indicators relevant to this issue are fish stocks and catches in UK waters. The key sustainable development objective is to limit emissions of greenhouse gases which may contribute to global warming and climate change. Indicators of relevance are greenhouse gas radiative forcing rates, global temperature change, and UK emissions of greenhouse gases.

Has the power of the sea been utilized to its full advantage. The key sustainable development objective is to restrict atmospheric emissions of substances which cause stratospheric ozone depletion. Indicators of relevance are chlorine loading in the atmosphere, ozone depletion over the UK and consumption and emissions of ozone-depleters in Europe. The key sustainable development issues are to limit acid emissions and ensure appropriate land management practices. Indicators of relevance are exceedences of provisional critical loads for acidity, UK emissions of acidifying pollutants from major sources, and expenditure on pollution abatement.

The key sustainable development objective is to control air pollution in order to reduce the risks of adverse effects on natural ecosystems, human health and quality of life. Key issues are to reduce pollutant emissions to improve local air quality, especially in urban areas, and to control photochemical pollution. Indicators to illustrate these issues are concentrations of pollutants at selected sites, UK emissions of pollutants, and expenditure on pollution abatement.

The key sustainable development objectives are to sustain and improve water quality and the aquatic environment. Other objectives included under these broad aims are to manage the discharge of waste water, to control pollution, to ensure adequate water resources of sufficient quality are available for abstraction for treatment as drinking water, and to facilitate the recreational use of water where appropriate.

Acidification of freshwater is covered by in the section on Acid deposition. List 3 methods of testing freshwater quality. The key sustainable development issue for the coastal and marine environment is to prevent pollution from human activities especially those which result in the discharge of effluent reaching the sea via rivers, estuaries and directly from the coast.

This is to be achieved by maintaining and improving current controls on man-made inputs, particularly those containing substances which are toxic, persistent and liable to bioaccumulation.

This stretch of coastline exhibited evidence of oil spills. The key sustainable development objectives for wildlife are to conserve as far as reasonably possible the wide variety of wildlife species and habitats in the UK, and to ensure that commercially exploited species are managed in a sustainable way.

A key sustainable development issue is to balance the protection of the countryside's landscape and habitats of value for wildlife with the maintenance of an efficient supply of good quality food and other products. The indicators relevant to this objective are changes in rural land cover, in particular for agricultural land which is the dominant cover, the extent of designated and protected areas in the UK, damage to designated and protected areas, agricultural productivity, nitrogen and pesticide inputs, the loss of linear landscape features, and agri-environment land management schemes.

List 5 desirable land cover characteristics. A growing body of work on measurement, however, is providing the means to better document current conditions and demonstrate progress. This article will review the research on metrics — indicators, indicator systems, and indices — that attempts to resolve the challenges of measurement. Sustainability is commonly described as comprising three interdependent pillars or dimensions: social, economic, and environmental.

A fourth, governance or institutions, is often included as well. These dimensions, however, only outline the general scope of a measurement framework. Sustainability is a complex and subjective concept, so in order to measure it, organizations must first define what it means to them and then choose indicators that give the most relevant information about their system and time scale of interest.

Sustainability indicators are derived from existing data sources that most closely approximate the qualities people are interested in measuring. Environmental quality, for instance, is typically described in terms of air and water quality, levels of greenhouse gas emissions, and biodiversity. Economic health is usually described using macro-level indicators such as GDP per capita, along with factors such as access to employment, education, and credit, which emphasize the role of individual opportunity.

Social equity is measured in literacy rates, infant mortality, health and life expectancy, and crime rates. They compiled a list of indicators contained in a collection of 22 indicator systems and then narrowed the list down to the most useful ones.

Table 1 illustrates this rubric, including an example of an indicator for each theme. One universal difficulty is that the indicators that are available are often only a rough approximation of the physical quality being measured. Although the characteristic feature of an indicator is less-than-ideal accuracy, this imprecision has fed skepticism about the possibilities for measuring sustainability.

Likewise, the goal of sustainability indicators is to give organizations enough information to set objective, attainable goals for sustainability and then make evidence-based policy decisions that bring them closer to those goals rather than precisely documenting natural or human systems.

Sustainability indicators can be more useful for planners and policymakers when they are bundled into indicator systems or aggregated into indices.

As well as comprehensive, national-level indicator systems such as the Indicators of Sustainable Development published by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, some systems have been developed recently that focus on more granular data, making them better suited for measuring urban or regional conditions and the effects of jurisdiction-level policies.

Although these systems are designed to maximize usage and comparability, a different strategy is to look at sustainability thematically, creating indicator systems designed for specific disciplines or perspectives.

For example, the Smart Mobility Framework from the California Department of Transportation Caltrans focuses on sustainability from the perspective of transportation planning, allowing it to concentrate on this sector while emphasizing its crosscutting implications. The framework encourages policymakers to consider six Smart Mobility Principles when making transportation decisions: location efficiency, reliable mobility, health and safety, environmental stewardship, social equity, and robust economy.

It cites 17 goals associated with one or more principles and suggests several indicators for measuring each one. A more concise alternative to indicator systems are indices, which combine two or more metrics or indicators mathematically to arrive at a single summary indicator.

Table 2 summarizes five commonly referenced indices and illustrates the unavoidable tradeoffs of representing sustainability using any one value. See www. An obvious difficulty is covering all three dimensions of sustainability in one index.

Even systems that cover the same dimensions can differ widely in approach. The Human Development Index HDI considers economic and social sustainability but overlooks the environment, whereas the Happy Planet Index HPI approximates the environmental costs of human quality of life but ignores the economic costs. The only one of the five that attempts to cover all three pillars of sustainability, the Genuine Progress Indicator GPI , lacks a standardized methodology and requires a host of assumptions to impute the values of various noneconomic costs.

All of these indices vary in scope, from an elegant but narrow accounting of the environmental cost of happiness HPI to a system that aspires to capture and monetize all both internalized and externalized costs and benefits of development GPI. One possible way to make the most of the available tools is to use them in combination; for example, the Footprint Network suggests using EF in combination with HDI. A more fundamental problem is that few if any sustainability indices employ standard mathematical rules of indexing.

This indicator also shows the impact on the life quality of the employees and the local community. By considering these sustainability indicators, through accurate analysis, we can develop a critical point of view towards the sustainability of our company and identify the aspects that have to be improved for reaching a good balance among the three areas of action of sustainability social, environmental and economic.

It is important to get information on this situation and being aware of the fact that it is really important to make your companies go green. For further information on sustainability, read our blog and subscribe to our newsletter! Travel these days is so easy. It can be inexpensive to travel any distance all across the globe, allowing you to visit places people never would have dreamed of visiting years ago.

But, the not so positive side to all of this is that traveling tends to hurt the environment and even the people […].

You are looking for a villa just for you and your friends, an exclusive place to spend your holidays with your family, a destination that combines luxury and comfort with respect for the environment and sustainability. We have selected 10 incredible villas […]. In the last years people around the world are becoming more sensitive towards sustainable topics. But, according to a recent study, the real champion of the sustainability are the women.