Sustainability by Caradonna Jeremy L

Author:Caradonna, Jeremy L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-08-05T15:17:00+00:00

SUSTAINABILITY METRICS, METHODS, AND MEASUREMENT TOOLS

When the UN released Agenda 21 in 1992, one of the central recommendations of this sustainable development action plan was to generate “better measurement [tools]” for understanding the value of “natural capital” and the sustainability of human practices. “It is also important,” the authors continued, “that national accounting procedures are not restricted to measuring the production of goods and services that are conventionally remunerated.”3 What this means is that industrial society in 1992 lacked viable methods for determining whether such-and-such a practice was sustainable. As we have seen, sustainability was essentially an unmeasurable abstraction.

Since 2000, however, sustainability has become less imprecise and more calculable as new metrics, methods, and measurement tools have developed. Older economic devices have been abandoned or supplemented by social and environmental metrics, and new sustainability assessment tools have been built from scratch.4 The net result has been the creation of completely new kinds of information that help rate the sustainability of everything from power plants and managed forests to the apples and shrimp that we buy at the grocery store. Macro-level metrics, such as the Ecological Footprint Analysis (EFA) and the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), can assess the sustainability of a whole country or even the entire human population. It was virtually impossible to make these kinds of assessments before the advent of new metrics. Table 6.1 outlines several major sustainability measurement tools.

Table 6.1 IS IT SUSTAINABLE? A SAMPLING OF SUSTAINABILITY MEASUREMENT TOOLS

Ecological Footprint Analysis (EFA)

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