Sustainability Assessment of Communities and Ecological Footprint Flashcards
Why sustainability assessment at community level?
The economic, environmental and social objectives of sustainable development may be effectively achieved by acting in the local context and in particular the urban context.
–> Tools for sustainability assessment at local level.
Economic issues in communities
- satisfying jobs
- jobs and opportunities
- living wages
- stable businesses
- stable investments
- stable value of properties
- appropriate technology development and implementation
- business development
Sustainable communities - Economic issues
If a community doesn’t have a strong economy, it cannot be sustainable.
Sustainable communities - Environmental issues
A community can be sustainable if it’s not degrading its environment or using up finite resources.
Environmental issues in communities
- protect human and environmental health
- having healthy ecosystem and habitat
- reducing and/or eliminating pollution in water, air and land and providing green spaces and parks for wildlife, recreation and other uses
- pursuing ecosystem management
- protecting biodiversity
Sustainable communities - Social issues
If a community has significant social problems, then it cannot be sustainable.
Social issues in communities
- education
- crime
- equity
- inner city problems
- community building
- spirituality
- environmental justice
What’s a sustainability assessment?
- A tool that can help decision-makers and policy-makers decide what actions they should take in an attempt to make society more sustainable.
Aim of Sustainability Assessment
To ensure that plans and activities make an optimal contribution to sustainable development.
What makes a good indicator of sustainability?
- address carrying capacity
- relevant to community
- understandable to the community
- usable by the community
- long term view
- show linkage
Data
Figures that need further processing (e.g. aggregation to national level, adjustment for season, climate, economic cycles, etc.) before they can be called statistics.
Statistics
Data coming from official sources.
Statistics are figures describing real phenomena according to an exact definition.
Indicators
Send correct messages without a need fro further interpretation.
Gross Domestic Product GDP
Total value of everything produced by all the people and companies in the country.
Components of GDP
- Personal Consumption Expenditures C
- Business Investment I
- Government Spending G
- Exports and Imports X, M
C + I + G + (X - M)
Limits of Sustainable Indicators
- Difficulty to measure the multidimensionality of sustainable development.
- Use of indicators that are difficult to understand for outsiders.
- Peculiarities of every local context need the use of ad hoc set of indicators.
- The community doesn’t identify their indicators through a participative process, experts choose them.
Examples of Aggregated Indexes
- GDP (Gross Domestic Product)
- Environmental Performance Index
- Policy Performance Index
- Ecological Footprint
- Human Development Index
Policy Performance Index PPI
Index to judge the performance of a government. It contains economic, social and environmental indicators.
The weight of the indicators should represent the importance of each area of policy-making.
Dashboard of Sustainability
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Tool (Software) that allows to synthesize a wide variety of data and environmental, economic and social information in a single graphical and numerical evaluation form.
All the indicators within a theme are given equal weight and the 4 themes (social, environment, economic and institutional) have a weight of 25% within the Sustainable Development Index (SDI).
Aggregation model of the Dashboard of Sustainability
- The outer ring represents the individual indicators used to evaluate sustainability.
- The inner ring represents synthetic indexes, which aggregate multiple indicators (environment, economy and social care) into a single measure.
- The innermost circle is reserved for a synthetic index of overall sustainability (SDI Sustainable Development Index or PPI Policy Performance Index). This is obtained by averaging the indexes of the inner ring.
How does the Dashboard calculate the color and the score of each indicator?
The software orders all values from the best to the worst performance, ranging from 0 (worst performance, dark red) to 1000 points (best performance, dark green). All other values are calculated by linear interpolation between these extremes.
Relative Valuation
Performance is judged relative to the one expected for e.g. the per capita GDP of the respective country.
Capital Approach
Indicates that concern about sustainability and sustainable development places one’s emphasis squarely on wealth and what is happening to wealth along any path.
Types of capital
- Natural capital: natural resources
- Man-made capital: machines, buildings, infrastructures
- Human capital: organization, knowledge, skills
Types of consumption
- Apparent consumption: production plus imports minus exports, sometimes also adjusted for changes in inventories.
- Final consumption: goods and services consumed by individual households or the community to satisfy their collective needs and wants.
Carrying capacity
Maximum population of a species an area can support without reducing its ability to support the same species in the future.
Function of the area and of the organism.
Ecological Footprint
Indicator of 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 a nation uses to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb the wast it generates with today’s technology and resource management practices.
Biocapacity
Area of land and sea to serve a particular use.
Overshoot
Point at which demand for ecological goods and services exceeds the available supply.
It indicates that stocks of ecological capital may be depleting and/or that waste is accumulating.
Ecological Debt
When a country/region or city demands more bio-capacity than available on their own territory.
Ecological Surplus
When a country/region or city demands less bioproductive capacity than they have at their disposal in their own territory.
Fair share
Equal share of global bioproductive capacity available to each individual.
Unit of Measure of Ecological Footprint
Global hectare gha - one hectare (2.47 acres) of productive biological area, with an annual productivity equal to the world average.
Inverted Carrying Capacity
Flow indicator that expresses environmental pressures imposed by consumption in terms of biocapacity measured in standardized in global hectares (gha).
Easiest form of Calculation of Environmental Footprint
EF = D/Y
D = annual demand of a product Y = annual yield (rendimiento) of the same product in global hectares
Global Hectares
Factors for Estimation
- Yield factors: compare national average yield per hectare to world average yield in the same land category. They account for countries’ different levels of productivity for particular land use types.
- Equivalence factors: capture the relative productivity among the various land and sea area types. They facilitate the aggregation of ecological impacts in terms of biological productivity across land-types - conversion from hectare into global hectares.
Human Development Index HDI
Summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: 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 3 dimensions.
