L4. Sus. Ass. for Communities & Ecological Footprint

Question 1

Sustainable Communities

Answer 1

Sustainable communities are places where people want to live and work, now and in the future. They meet the diverse needs of existing and future residents, are sensitive to their environment, and contribute to a high quality of life. They are safe and inclusive, well planned, built and run, and offer equality of opportunity and good services for all.
* Long-term integrated systems approaches, healthy communities, and quality-of-life issues by addressing economic, environmental, and social issues
* All three dimensions interdependent and integrated

Question 2

Sustainable Communities: Environmental Issues

Answer 2

• 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 3

Sustainable Communities: Economic Issues

Answer 3

• satisfying jobs
• Jobs & opportunities
• living wages
• stable businesses
• stable investments
• stable value of your properties
• appropriate technology development and implementation
• business development, etc.

Question 4

Sustainable Communities: Social Issues

Answer 4

• education
• crime
• equity
• inner-city problems
• community building
• spirituality
• environmental justice, etc.

Question 5

Procedures towards Sustainable Community Efforts

Answer 5

1. Developing ongoing governance structure for the sustainable community efforts;
2. Creating a sustainable community vision
3. Setting goals and objectives along with indicators
4. Developing sustainability guiding principles
5. Designing and prioritizing potential activities
6. Choosing and implementing activities
7. Evaluating progress and revising activities accordingly

Question 6

Data

Answer 6

Data are figures that need further processing (e.g. aggregation to national level, adjustment for season, climate, economic cycles etc.), before they can be called statistics.

Question 7

Statistics

Answer 7

Statistics are data coming from official sources. They are figures describing real phenomena according to an exact definition.

Question 8

Indicators

Answer 8

They should send correct messages without a need for further interpretation. Indicators may require adjustments.

Question 9

Requirements for a good Indicator of Sustainability

Answer 9

• Address carrying capacity (wether usage rate faster than renewed or restored)
• Relevant to community
• Understandable to the community
• Usable to the community
• Long term view
• Show linkages

Question 10

Limits of Indicators of Sustainability

Answer 10

• Difficult to measure multidimensionality
• Complexity of the observed phenomena and their interrelationship difficult to understand for outsiders
• Local context needs the use of ad hoc set of indicators

Question 11

Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

Answer 11

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. The components of GDP Expenditure approach are:
+ Personal Consumption Expenditures
+ Business Investment
+ Government Spending
+ Exports minus Imports.
It does not take into account environmental and social externalities.

Question 12

Policy Performance Index (PPI)

Answer 12

PPI is an index containing economic, social and environmental indicators. The weight of the indicators should represent the importance of each area for policy-making.

Question 13

The Dashboard of Sustainability

Answer 13

The Dashboard of Sustainability displays the United Nations’ core set of sustainability indicators. A software allows to synthesize a wide variety of data and environmental, economic, and social information in a single graphical and numerical evaluation form. The Index is composed of 4 sub-indices (equally weighted):
* Social
* Environment
* Economic
* Institutional

Question 14

Dashboard of Sustainability Code and Calculation

Answer 14

• Worst – Best performance: 0 points (dark red) – 1000 points (dark green)
• Linear Interpolation for intermediate scores
• The size of a segment reflects the relative importance of the issue described by the indicator
• The central circle (PPI, Policy Performance Index) summarizes the information of the component indicators
  (𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑒𝐷𝑆)𝑖=1000∗[(𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒)𝑖−(𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒)𝑤][(𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒)𝑏−(𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒)𝑤]
  (scoreDS) = the DSscore assigned to indicator for context i (value)i = the value of indicator for context i (value)b = the best value of indicator among all contexts (value)w = the worst value of indicator among all contexts

Question 15

Dashboard of Sustainability: Aggregation Model

Answer 15

• Outer ring represents the individual indicators used to evaluate sustainability
• Inner ring represents synthetic indexes, which integrate multiple indicators (Environment, Economy, and Social Care) into a single measure
• Innermost circle is reserved for a synthetic index of overall sustainability (SDI, the Sustainable Development Index, or PPI, the Policy Performance Index). This synthetic index is obtained by averaging the indexes of the inner ring

Question 16

Operationalizing Sustainability – The Capital Approach

Answer 16

Capital comprises those inputs that are necessary in economic processes and that endure (as opposed to inputs that are used up upon consumption). It embodies much of what is necessary to create the flows of services and materials necessary for economic production, today and for the future. If capital is maintained constant or growing over time, then economic production, too, can be sustained over time.

Question 17

Types of Capital

Answer 17

• Natural capital: natural resources – living and non-living
• Man-made capital: machines, buildings, infrastructures
• Human capital: organization, knowledge, skills
• (Social capital)?

Question 18

Consumption & Trade in the Context of Sustainability

Answer 18

• Taking the global supply chain into account means that we need to trace international trade across borders and sectors
• Domestic technology assumption, Unidirectional Trade, Multidirectional Trade
• Top down: Start from the entire economy – Bottom up: Start from individual product

Question 19

Types of Consumption

Answer 19

• Apparent consumption: Production plus imports minus exports, sometimes also adjusted for changes in inventories
• Final consumption: Final consumption are the goods and services consumed by individual households or the community to satisfy their collective needs or wants

Question 20

Ecological Footprint

Answer 20

The indicator Ecological Footprint 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. It 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 21

Ecological Footprint Lingo

Answer 21

• 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.
• Ecological Debt: A country/region demands more biocapacity than available on their own territory
• Ecological Surplus: A country/region demands less bioproductive capacity than they have at their disposal on their own territory.
• Fair share: The equal share of global bioproductive capacity available to each individual.

Question 22

Assumptions for the Ecological Footprint

Answer 22

• Resources and wastes can be quantified
• They can be measured in terms of biologically productive area. Resource and waste flows that cannot be measured are excluded.
• Different types of areas can be converted into the common unit of global hectares: hectares with biomass productivity equal to the world average productivity
• Areas can be added up to a total representing the aggregate human demand.
• Natures’ supply of ecological services can also be expressed in global hectares of biologically productive space.
• Area demand can exceed area supply → ecological overshoot

Question 23

Yield Factors (YF)

Answer 23

Yield factors account for countries different levels of productivity for particular land use types. They are country-specific, and vary by land-use type and year. They reflect differences in both natural factors as well as management practices and the weighted average of countries‘ YFs add to the world average.

Question 24

Equivalence factors (EQF)

Answer 24

EQFs facilitate the aggregation of ecological impacts in terms of biological productivity across land-types – conversion from hectare into global hectares. They weight the land areas based on their biological productivity relative to one hectare with average biological productivity and vary by land use type and year. Weighted average of equivalence factor adds to 1, i.e. total amount of land area remains unchanged – just for weighting in terms of „ecological impact.

Question 25

Criticism of the Ecological Footprint

Answer 25

• No account taken of regional and local land features of land-types
• Physical weights for aggregation
• Fixed weighting scheme
• Arbitrariness and not observable: Mixes up real and hypothetical land – note that only the inclusion of hypothetical land allows for „unsustainability“
• Indicator which arbitrarily mixes-up land use and climate change issues without treating both comprehensively
• No distinction between sustainable and unsustainable land-uses
• Assumption that land types can only serve a single purpose is not realistic
• Use of inconsistent data sources
• Incomplete in terms of the inclusion of indirect emissions from energy commodities
• Use of a very simple methodology to estimated energy and CO2 emissions embodied in traded goods and services
• Other important impact areas (e.g. land disturbance, acidification, biodiversity loss)?

Question 26

Human Development Index (HDI)

Answer 26

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and have a decent standard of living. The HDI is the geometric mean of normalized indices for each of the three dimensions.

Question 27

Steps of the Human Development Index

Answer 27

1. Creating the dimensions indices
   * Minimum and maximum values (goalposts) are set
   * dimension indices are calculated
2. Aggregating the dimensional indices to produce the Human Development Index
   * The HDI is the geometric mean of the three dimension indices