Sustainability triangle is composed by three vertexes: economy, environment and society. The literature about quantitative economic and environmental indicators is quite rich, whereas that on quantitative social indicators is rather scarce. Any suggestions on appropriate quantitative social indicators?
Dear Carlos,
The Human Development Index (HDI) by the United Nations has several sustainable development indicators including social indicators related to education, heath and so on.
Take a look at:
http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi
Regards, Juan
Depending on which context sustainability is seen from inter played with social, economic, cultural, environment and politics, may vary with it associated indications, and in the first place any indicator of sustainability not look at from interconnected or systemic points of view will not and can not give you clear or all the indicators or holistic view of the entire system that can be altered with small changes in its leverage points. Please read more on Bayesian Belief Network modelling and the Systems thinking approach
Regards,
Banson
Many social indicators can be use to evalute social sustainability, and may be bundled together. Surely, the most important are health, employment, social services provided, education, but many more can be added. Social capital for example, seems to be a very important synthetic indicator, assembling trust, reciprocity, cohesion, pro-active indicator. Obviously all these indicators have to be operazionalized from the point of view of quantitative investigation.
One thing I think is equity issue of environmental justice, that relates very closely to how environmental cost or burden is mostly placed on the poor community.
Dear Carlos,
Hi
I think you can find two of my publications alongside the articles cited in them useful.
Best,
Article Designing a General Set of Sustainability Indicators at the ...
Article Developing a Fuzzy Corporate Performance Rating System: A Pe...
As per my opinion, GRI disclosure on social sustainability include vast parameters under different categories. They are quantified in nature to report. So, u may go for GRI G4 disclosures on social sustainability.
I don't like indicators, I'd rather have units.
The dashboard of a jumbo jet may have 140 indicators that allow the pilot to adjust how they are operating their complex system. Not a single one was used to design the airplane. The designer had to understand the relationships between the competing forces, and find an optimal design to achieve the performance envelope.
The units of Sustainability I would use would be:
- time required for people to meet their needs (must be less than 24h/d/ca for a viable community)
- how effectively people use their time to meet their needs (must be less than 100%)
- resources used and wastes produced by people, in excess of the ecological interest of the landmass where they live (can be converted to units of time by using the slope of the resource/time relationship for the community)
You can then look at things like social justice (eg, no subset of the community must bear a greater burden than benefit from any given development activity), or ecological justice (no community can have an ecological footprint larger than their biocapacity), or ecological resilience (each community must set aside a non-declining portion of each biome they manage to be neither a source of resources nor a sink for wastes, to ensure that any gap in understanding of the ecosystem does not lead immediately to ecological collapse), or social imperitive (it must not be impossible for all people to have all needs met within a community in 24h/d/ca), and so on.
As long as everything is in the same units, and you understand the relationships between the units so you can convert one to another, you can now design for the system as a whole.
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