4. Sustainability Assessment Communities & Ecological Footprint

Question 1

Requirements (from the GRI)

Answer 1

• Mandatory instructions
• In the text, requirements are presented in bold font
  and indicated with the word ‘shall’
• Requirements are to be read in the context of recommendations and guidance
• however, an organization is not required to
  comply with recommendations or guidance in order
  to claim that a report has been prepared in
  accordance with the Standards

Question 2

Recommendations (from the GRI)

Answer 2

• Cases where a particular course of action is encouraged, but not required
• In the text, the word ‘should’ indicates a
  recommendation

Question 3

Guidance (from the GRI)

Answer 3

• These sections include background
  information, explanations and examples to help
  organizations better understand the requirements
• An organization is required to comply with all
  applicable requirements in order to make a claim that
  its report has been prepared in accordance with the
  GRI Standards

Question 4

Sustainable communities - Environmental Issues

Answer 4

• From an environmental standpoint, a community can be sustainable over the long term only if it is not degrading its environment or using up finite resources
• Environmental concerns include
• protecting human and environmental health
• having healthy ecosystems and habitat
• reducing and/or eliminating pollution in water, air, and land
• providing green spaces and parks for wildlife, recreation, and other uses
• pursuing ecosystem management
• protecting biodiversity; etc.

Question 5

Sustainable communities – Economic Issues

Answer 5

Economic issues include:
- satisfying jobs
- Jobs & opportunities
- living wages
- stable businesses
- stable investments
- stable value of your properties
- appropriate technology development and implementation
- business development, etc.

If a community does not have a strong economy, then it cannot be healthy and sustainable over the long term.

Question 6

Sustainable communities - Social Issues

Answer 6

• A community must also address social issues. If a community has significant social problems, such as serious crime, then it cannot be healthy and stable over the long term.
• Social issues addressed in sustainable community efforts include education, crime, equity, inner-city problems, community building, spirituality, environmental justice, etc.
• Furthermore, such a community probably will not be able to address other key community issues, such as environmental problems, because it is so busy dealing with its social problems.

Question 7

How do Communities develop sustainability initiatives?

Answer 7

Below are seven procedures that communities often go through as they develop sustainable community efforts:
- Developing ongoing governance structure for the sustainable community efforts
- Creating a sustainable community vision
- Setting goals and objectives along with indicators
- Developing sustainability guiding principles
- Designing and prioritizing potential activities
- Choosing and implementing activities
- Evaluating progress and revising activities accordingly

Question 8

What makes a good indicator of sustainability?

Answer 8

• Address carrying capacity: Whether the community is using resources at a rate faster than they are being renewed or restored.
• Relevant to community: Communities should select indicators that are relevant to their situations.
• Understandable to the community
• Useable by the community: If indicators are not used by the community, they will not have any effect on what people do.
• Long term view: Sustainability is a long term goal. We need long term indicators.
• Show linkages: Traditional indicators tend to be narrowly focused on one aspect of a community.

Question 9

Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

Answer 9

GDP is the total value of everything produced by all the people and companies in the country. It doesn’t matter if they are citizens or foreign-owned companies.

Question 10

Components of GDP Expenditure approach

Answer 10

Personal Consumption Expenditures + Business Investment + Government Spending + (Exports - Imports) -> C + I + G + (X-M).

Question 11

Critics to the GDP

Answer 11

There are many different ways to measure a country’s GDP: Nominal GDP, Real GDP but anyway, none of them take into account social and environmental externalities.

Question 12

Are we allowed to aggregate “apples and oranges”?

Answer 12

• What looks so simple at first sight - aggregate all relevant indicators into one index - touches one of the oldest disputes of indicator theory: should we
  “aggregate apples and oranges”?
• Many experts still categorically reject to do so, saying it is scientifically unsound to compare, for example, car production, hazardous waste and gender equality on the basis of a common unit.

BUT actually we use aggregated index in several situations:
* GDP
* Environmental Performance index
* Policy Performance Index
* Ecological Footprint
* Human Development Index

Question 13

Substitute the GDP with more reliable INDEX:
Policy Performance Index (PPI)

Answer 13

• While we have clear ideas how to define the respective share of car and bicycle industries in GDP (through their value added measured in Euros), there are not yet market prices for issues like poverty, gender equality, education, emissions or destruction of habitats
• For the purpose of judging the performance of the government, we want to construct a “Policy Performance Index”, containing economic, social and environmental indicators. The weight of the indicators should represent the importance of each area for
  policy-making
• If you had 100 points to distribute on the three issues, how many points would you allocate to each of them?

Question 14

Dashboard of Sustainability

Answer 14

The tool was developed by the Consultative Group on Sustainable Development Indices (CGSDI) and the Joint Research Center (JRC, Ispra). The JRC also designed the free software application that implements this tool. The software allows to synthesize a wide variety of data and environmental, economic, and social information in a single graphical and numerical evaluation form.

Question 15

Ecological Footprint (Figure with foot)

Answer 15

• Energy
• Waste
• Travel
• Food
• Wood
• Biodiversity
• Built Land
• Energy Land
• Bioproductive Sea
• Bioproductive Land

Question 16

Operationalizing Sustainability: The Capital Approach

Answer 16

The capital approach indicates that concern about sustainability and sustainable development places one’s emphasis squarely on wealth and what is happening to wealth, broadly construed, along any path.
Why is this? This question might be reformulated as asking the following. What is the link between current wealth and future well-being?
The answer to this question is, in accounting terms, changes in real asset values.

Question 17

Natural resources: vital to human survival (Renewable and Nonrenewable Resources)

Answer 17

Renewable resources:
* Perpetually available: sunlight, wind, wave energy
* Renew themselves over short periods: timber, water, soil
- These can be destroyed
Nonrenewable resources: can be depleted
* Oil, coal, minerals

Question 18

Ecological Footprint (EF)

Answer 18

The notion of Ecological Footprint (EF) was introduced in 1996 by Reesand Wackernagel. This indicator was defined as the area of land and water hypothetically required to provide the resources and to absorb the waste generated by a human population.

Research question:
How much of the biological capacity of the planet is demanded by the residents of a nation (state, city, etc.) ?
How much is available?

EF accounting tool:
To answer this question, the Ecological Footprint measures the amount of biologically productive land and water area which a nation uses to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb the waste that it generates with today’s technology and resource management practices.

Question 19

Ecological Footprint definitions

Answer 19

• The Ecological Footprint is defined as the “productive land and water ecosystem necessary to produce the resources consumed by the population and to assimilate wastes produced by the population, in any place located on land and water”
• The total “Footprint” for a given population’s activities is measured in terms of “global hectares.” A global hectare is one hectare (2.47 acres) of productive biological area, with an annual productivity equal to the world average.

Question 20

Ecological Footprint Lingo

Answer 20

• Biocapacity: the area of land and sea to serve a particular use.
• Overshoot: point at which demand for ecological goods and services exceeds the available supply.
  Overshoot indicates that stocks of ecological capital may be depleting and/or that waste is accumulating.
• Ecological Debt: when a country/region or city demand more biocapacity than available on their own territory.
• Ecological Surplus: when a country/region or city demand less bioproductive capacity than they have attheir disposal on their own territory.
• Fair share: The equal share of global bioproductive capacity available to each individual.

Question 21

Ecological Footprint in easiest/ basic form (Equation 1)

Answer 21

EF = D/Y
Where
* D is the annual demand of a product and Y is the annual yield of the same product (Borucke et al, 2013).
* Yield is expressed in global hectares. In practice, global hectares are estimated with the help of two factors:
the yield factors, which compare national average yield per hectare to world average yield in the same land category; and the equivalence factors, which capture the relative productivity among the various land and sea area types.

Question 22

Ecological Footprint further details (Equation 2)

Answer 22

EF = (P/YN)* YF * EQF
Where
* P is the amount of a product harvested or waste emitted (equal to D above),
* YN is the national average yield for P, and
* YF and EQF are the respective yield factors and equivalence factors for the country and land use type in question.
* The yield factor is the ratio of national-to-world-average yields, which is calculated as the annual availability of usable products and varies by country and year.
* Equivalence factors translate the supply of or demand for an area of a specific land use type (e.g. world average cropland or grazing land) into units of world average biologically productive area expressed in global hectares. These factors can vary by land use, type and year.

Question 23

Ecological Footprint at global level I/O matrix

Answer 23

EF_C = EF_P + EF_I + EF_E

Question 24

Human Development Index (HDI)

Answer 24

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a summary measure of achievements in three key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living.
The HDI is the geometric mean of normalized indices for each of the three dimensions.
* There are two steps to calculating the HDI:
- Step 1 - Creating the dimension indices
- Step 2 - Aggregating the dimensional indices to produce the Human Development Index