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Measuring sustainability
There are many important things that are not measurable, but in general, people
value what they measure. One of the biggest challenges is how to measure all
our assets and our progress toward sustainable development. Since the
Brundtland Commission, there have been many efforts to develop indicators of
sustainability. Much of the progress in developing indicators for measuring
sustainability has been in the economic and environmental sphere (box
2.2). Social indexes, such as transparency, trust, and conflict are
still at early stages of development. The fact that social indicators are less
developed reflects the ongoing debate about the concept of social
sustainability: what it means and what should be measured.
Box 2.2 Indicators
for measuring sustainability-a subset
Some of the main approaches to developing indicators of environmental
sustainability are the following:
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Extended national accounts
Green Accounts System of Environmental and Economic Accounts. United
Nations. A framework for environmental accounting.
Adjusted Net Savings. World Bank. Change in total wealth,
accounting for resource depletion and environmental damage.
Genuine Progress Indicator, Redefining Progress, and Index of Sustainable
Economic Welfare. United Kingdom and other countries. An
adjusted GDP figure, reflecting welfare losses from environmental and social
factors.
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Biophysical accounts
Ecological Footprint, Redefining Progress. World Wildlife Fund
and others. A measure of the productive land and sea area required to produce
food and fiber, and in renewable form, the energy consumed by different
lifestyles within and among countries.
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Equally weighted indexes*
Living Planet Index. World Wildlife Fund. An assessment of the
populations of animal species in forests, fresh water, and marine environments.
Environmental Sustainability Index. World Economic Forum. An
aggregate index spanning 22 major factors that contribute to environmental
sustainability.
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Unequally weighted indexes*
Environmental
Pressure Indexes. Netherlands, EU. A set of aggregate indexes
for specific environmental pressures such as acidification or emissions of
greenhouse gases.
Well-being of Nations. Prescott-Allen. A set of indexes that
capture elements of human well-being and ecosystem well-being and combines them
to construct barometers of sustainability.
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Eco-efficiency
Resource Flows. World Resources Institute. Total material flows
underpinning economic processes.
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Indicator sets
U.N. Commission for Sustainable Development and many countries.
* Equally weighted indexes are those whose components are equally weighted and
then aggregated, while unequally weighted indexes give some components greater
weight than others.
Source: Authors.
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