It is very difficult to establish precise measures for the sustainable development process. Sustainable economic development in correlation with ecology should be measured to determine if it is being implemented. It is necessary to define precise determinants that on one hand will determine the pace of economic development and on the other hand will take into account specific issues of ecology. It should be a set of quantified indicators based on selected measurable and quantitative data, so that the whole analytical process can be considered as a research objective method. The best solution will therefore be to develop an analytical scoring method, for which the basic components of this method will be defined economic and ecological quantitative indicators.
In view of the above, the current question is: How to define precise measurable factors for the process of sustainable economic and ecological development?
Please, answer, comments. I invite you to the discussion.
I use exergy; exergo-economic and exergo-environmental analyses.
Very nice topic dear Dr. Dariusz Prokopowicz.
1- Sustainable economic means "Little spending with guarantee of high quality product".
2- Ecological development means "Low environmental damages".
Kind regards
Balanced score card approach based on carbon or biological footprint is my preference
I think it all starts with definitions. The Brundtland Report provides a description of sustainable development, but it is not sufficiently exclusive to produce definitions. From an engineering perspective, everything that can be designed for has to be measured, and the units, and the relationship between the units, must be part of the definitions. Work is related to Energy is related to Force, and so forth.
Indicators are much less useful, because I can't design for indicators. There are either too many (CIW, for example) for me to understand the trade-offs between them, or so few that I end up designing for the indicator, rather than with the indicator. I wrote a story about that: http://sustainabilityengineering.net/2015/10/27/goldilocks-and-the-3-sets-of-indicators/
So, what are the units of Sustainability? What do the definitions have to be that would produce self-consistent units that can be converted from and to? What are we trying to accomplish with development?
From those questions, I got to:
Sustainability is the ability of a community to be able to meet all of the needs of all of the population using the resources available from the land being managed and the skills of the population, in perpetuity. The units of measure would be ecological impacts (I am fond of Ecological Footprint, but Planetary Boundaries would work just as well), the time required to meet needs within the community, and the time that would be required to meet needs within the community, as if all of the needs were being met.
This allows for potentially unique solutions to any given problem, for any culture, climate, resource availability, skill set, scale of community, etc.
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