Sustainability Assessment of Communities and Ecological Footprint

Question 1

Why sustainability assessment at community level?

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

Economic issues in communities

Answer 2

• satisfying jobs
• jobs and opportunities
• living wages
• stable businesses
• stable investments
• stable value of properties
• appropriate technology development and implementation
• business development

Question 3

Sustainable communities - Economic issues

Answer 3

If a community doesn’t have a strong economy, it cannot be sustainable.

Question 4

Sustainable communities - Environmental issues

Answer 4

A community can be sustainable if it’s not degrading its environment or using up finite resources.

Question 5

Environmental issues in communities

Answer 5

• 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

Question 6

Sustainable communities - Social issues

Answer 6

If a community has significant social problems, then it cannot be sustainable.

Question 7

Social issues in communities

Answer 7

• education
• crime
• equity
• inner city problems
• community building
• spirituality
• environmental justice

Question 8

What’s a sustainability assessment?

Answer 8

• A tool that can help decision-makers and policy-makers decide what actions they should take in an attempt to make society more sustainable.

Question 9

Aim of Sustainability Assessment

Answer 9

To ensure that plans and activities make an optimal contribution to sustainable development.

Question 10

What makes a good indicator of sustainability?

Answer 10

• address carrying capacity
• relevant to community
• understandable to the community
• usable by the community
• long term view
• show linkage

Question 11

Data

Answer 11

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 12

Statistics

Answer 12

Data coming from official sources.

Statistics are figures describing real phenomena according to an exact definition.

Question 13

Indicators

Answer 13

Send correct messages without a need fro further interpretation.

Question 14

Gross Domestic Product GDP

Answer 14

Total value of everything produced by all the people and companies in the country.

Question 15

Components of GDP

Answer 15

• Personal Consumption Expenditures C
• Business Investment I
• Government Spending G
• Exports and Imports X, M

C + I + G + (X - M)

Question 16

Limits of Sustainable Indicators

Answer 16

• 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.

Question 17

Examples of Aggregated Indexes

Answer 17

• GDP (Gross Domestic Product)
• Environmental Performance Index
• Policy Performance Index
• Ecological Footprint
• Human Development Index

Question 18

Policy Performance Index PPI

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

Dashboard of Sustainability

!!!

Answer 19

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).

Question 20

Aggregation model of the Dashboard of Sustainability

Answer 20

• 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.

Question 21

How does the Dashboard calculate the color and the score of each indicator?

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

Relative Valuation

Answer 22

Performance is judged relative to the one expected for e.g. the per capita GDP of the respective country.

Question 23

Capital Approach

Answer 23

Indicates that concern about sustainability and sustainable development places one’s emphasis squarely on wealth and what is happening to wealth along any path.

Question 24

Types of capital

Answer 24

1. Natural capital: natural resources
2. Man-made capital: machines, buildings, infrastructures
3. Human capital: organization, knowledge, skills

Question 25

Types of consumption

Answer 25

• 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.

Question 26

Carrying capacity

Answer 26

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.

Question 27

Ecological Footprint

Answer 27

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.

Question 28

Biocapacity

Answer 28

Area of land and sea to serve a particular use.

Question 29

Overshoot

Answer 29

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.

Question 30

Ecological Debt

Answer 30

When a country/region or city demands more bio-capacity than available on their own territory.

Question 31

Ecological Surplus

Answer 31

When a country/region or city demands less bioproductive capacity than they have at their disposal in their own territory.

Question 32

Fair share

Answer 32

Equal share of global bioproductive capacity available to each individual.

Question 33

Unit of Measure of Ecological Footprint

Answer 33

Global hectare gha - one hectare (2.47 acres) of productive biological area, with an annual productivity equal to the world average.

Question 34

Inverted Carrying Capacity

Answer 34

Flow indicator that expresses environmental pressures imposed by consumption in terms of biocapacity measured in standardized in global hectares (gha).

Question 35

Easiest form of Calculation of Environmental Footprint

Answer 35

EF = D/Y

D = annual demand of a product
Y = annual yield (rendimiento) of the same product in global hectares

Question 36

Global Hectares

Factors for Estimation

Answer 36

• 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.

Question 37

Human Development Index HDI

Answer 37

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.