Sustainability measure: What is it and how do we measure it?
“An insight into history need and way forward for sustainability practice.”
Introduction
In terms of mathematical model, Time is a linear value, with change as a denominator of every intersecting equation. The living species and ecological balance are the variable result effected by each change or entropy, as explained by second law of thermodynamics. Charles Darwin tried to explain this relation of changing living ecosystem and time in his “Theory of Natural Selection” by introducing the concept of, “Survival of the fittest”, which revealed the timeline of change in living species. The living species that we see around as, are a result of continuous change best suiting to existing living condition to maintain an ecological balance and sustenance of living life on earth. This cycle of change is called evolution. Acc. to Evolutionary Science, “human beings are the highest evolved life species on earth and maybe the last”.
We human possess the power to think, feel and innovate. This is what separate us from the other life form on earth and places us on the highest rank on the food chain. With such rank comes great luxury and the power to abuse the ecological cycle to our personal need and economic benefit. Acc. to Newton laws of Energy,” Every action has equal and opposite reaction”. Our pattern of production and consumption based on our selfish economic intention/ uncounted action of developmental progress of human species at the explicating expense of other life form, has led to disruption in ecological balance and created consequences of life threatening condition for us. Concern looms everywhere, from declining pollinators affecting food security, to air and water pollution affecting the quality of life, and land shortage and degradation affecting both agriculture and bio diversity. Our progress has ultimately become our own greatest enemy.
History of Sustainability
This has raised a fear of our future survival and the extinction of all life forms on earth, at the expense of our unprecedented growth and has led global thinker and scientist to search for measure to achieve harmony with nature and balance in our development and future sustenance. Although the notion was felt then and it led to start of environmental movement in 70s. Ulrich Gober points out in, “A conceptual history of sustainable development(Nachhaltigkeit)” In 18th century forestry (at the time timber was key resource with uncertain future) Mr. Hans Carl von Carlowitz, a German nobleman and forester wrote “daß es eine continuirliche beständige und nachhal–tende Nutzung gebe,” (that there would be a continuous, steady and sustained use)”. But misalignment of written and expressed noble intention and on field execution practice let Europe no longer has any primeval forest outside of the Białowieża Forest in Poland and Belarus. The capitalist intention and Unmonitored consumption and regulation let to failure of this noble intention, which marked the failure of civilization as whole. Hence, the need was felt later that environment and economic are correlated to each other and we need better policies to achieve them together.
Global concept of Sustainability
Genesis of Sustainable Development
It was in 1972 when “The Club of Rome”, in its report, “Limits to Growth” came forward with idea of searching for a global equilibrium, “a world system that is: 1. Sustainable without sudden and uncontrolled collapse; and 2. Capable of satisfying the basic material requirement of all of its people”. That’s the first recorded evidence of need of synergy between development and existence and sustenance of human life form in coherence with existing ecology was expressed.
Global Participation in Sustainable Development
It was a group effort to create awareness amongst its society about the need for sustainability, but Sustainability is not an individual, group, local or national issue but it’s a global issue. Earth is shared system and one’s effort can’t be effective if it’s not collective or global in nature. The global think tank noted this and in 1987 when “The Brundtland Report”, was published by the United Nation World Commission on Environment and development, it coined, “Sustainable Development” the emergence of concept we know too well today was fully underway, then. Since that time, sustainability has come to be almost synonymous with sustainable defined in Our Common Future as the “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. This marked the beginning of the realisation of the need for sustainable development as guiding principle for global long-term development matric. The report also identified three indicators or three pillars for Sustainable development, which are namely: “Economic Development, Social Development and Environmental Protection”.
The time (during 90’s) when this report came out (1987), it was an era of Cold war (1947–91) between USA and Russia (then, USSR). The two of the global superpower wanted to get ahead of each other and were developing and heavily investing money and resources in defence technologies to get ahead of each other curve. But, then Perestroika, a political movement for reformation in the Communist Party of Soviet Union, took place in USSR. This restructuring movement to reform political and economic system lead to dissolution of USSR in 1989 and put an end to Cold war. This peaceful revolution went on to become guiding principle for sustainable development.
Finally, that the cold war had ended in 1991, the global organisation felt that the money and resources that was used to fuel progress in armed weapons and strategy could now be channelled to funnel war against poverty and ecological pollution. To benefit from such development, Earth Summit was held in Rio De Janeiro on 1992 and they pushed forward three pillars, considered as development principles for global and national and local development by advocating “economic growth, social inclusion and environmental balance” and the goal of sustainable development was reframed as “sustainable development is to achieve economic, environmental and social development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
Measure of Sustainability –
Triple Bottom Line
The reframed model was well accepted by institution, academician and organisation then, but the problem laid in how to practise sustainable development and were vastly struggling on how to measure it. It was not long before two years when John Elkington coined the concept of “Triple Bottom line” (abbreviated as TBL or 3BL), which has become the structuring axis to quantify sustainability practice across global, national and local policies, to till date. This accounting framework marks development by going beyond the traditional framework of profit, returns on investment and shareholder value to include environmental and social dimension. The core of this measure is, that it focusses on comprehensive investment results by interrelating performance with interrelated dimensions of profits, people and the planet.
The sub component to measure the three functions are as follows:
Economic Measures/ Profit
Economic measure measures the business revenue and cash flow in and out, by taking into consideration the factors of consumption and production, job creation, active work force strength, diverse employee at the work place, company expenditure, taxes and etc. Specific examples are as below.
Personal income
Cost of underemployment
Establishment churn
Establishment sizes
Job growth
Employment distribution by sector
Percentage of firms in each sector
Revenue by sector contributing to gross state product
Environmental Measures
Environmental variables measure how optimally was natural resources used, in its complete cycle. The cycle starts from identifying of source, procurement/ extraction from raw source, processing to obtain required material, production of production and waste discharge during the entire process. It also measures how the excessive or in excessive affects the eco cycle. Here are some the examples summarised below:
Sulphur dioxide concentration
Concentration of nitrogen oxides
Selected priority pollutants
Excessive nutrients
Electricity consumption
Fossil fuel consumption
Solid waste management
Hazardous waste management
Change in land use/land cover
Safety incident rate
Lost/restricted workday rate
Sales dollars per kilowatt hours
Greenhouse gas emissions
Use of post-consumer and industrial recycled material
Water consumption
Amount of waste to landfill
Social Measures
Social variable measures the social impact of development on community and society. It validates development on the basis of equal opportunity creation, access to opportunities, health and well- being, social equity and etc. below are the small snippets of potential variables:
Unemployment rate
Female labour force participation rate
Median household income
Relative poverty
Percentage of population with a post-secondary degree or certificate
Average commute time
Violent crimes per capita
Health-adjusted life expectancy Average hours of training/employee
From welfare to career retention
Charitable contributions
Here are few examples of TBL used in practise:
a). Regional Economic Development Initiative:
Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the Surrounding Region
The Grand Rapids region created the USA first “Community Sustainability Partnership” in 2005. The aim was to develop a roadmap to lead Grand Rapids to sustainability. The region employed 14 major indicators related to the region’s quality of life and environmental factors to determine progress made towards sustainability. Rather than just creating an index, target goals were established for each indicator. More detailed information of the metrics used for each indicator can be found in their TBL report. Below are brief explanations of the variables used to measure their TBL.
Environmental Quality
Waste: trends in recycling, refuse and yard waste
Energy: energy consumption, natural gas consumption and alternative fuel usage
Water: water consumption
Air Quality: toxic release inventory and number of air pollution ozone action days
Built Environment: number of LEED registered and certified projects
Land Use and Natural Habitat: inventory of land use and forest canopy
Transportation: public transportation ridership
Economic Prosperity
Personal Income: personal income per capita
Unemployment: unemployment rate
Redevelopment, Reinvestment and Jobs: results from brownfield redevelopment investment and job creation
Knowledge Competitiveness: third-party report ranking U.S. regions
Social Capital and Equity
Safety and Security: crime statistics
Educational Attainment: degree attainment levels
Health and Wellness: infant mortality rate and blood lead levels trends
Quality of Life: home ownership, poverty, and reduced price and free lunches trends
Community Capital: 211 calls for assistance, voter participation and population and ethnicity
b). Non-Profit
RSF Social Finance, a non-profit organization focussed on creating investment proposal to promote all the three TBL categories. The proposals were as follows:
Food and Agriculture (economic): Explore new economic models that support sustainable food and agriculture while raising public awareness of the value of organic and biodynamic farming.
Ecological Stewardship (environmental): Provide funding to organizations and projects devoted to sustaining, regenerating and preserving the earth’s ecosystems, especially integrated, systems-based and culturally relevant approaches.
Education and the Arts (social): Fund education and arts projects that are holistic and therapeutic.
Hence, its proven that TBL can be tailored to any organisation and size and it not only measures and monitors sustainable development but also helps to make policy at community or local level, allows organisation to evaluate the ramification of their decision from a long-run perspective, plan intervention at different sectors, project planning to minimise environmental harm, increase public participation and focus on community priority, designing their mission statements this are some example just to name a few. These methods can be used by business, govt. or non-profit organization, community because of the flexibility that it offers.
Although, it was new direction to measure sustainability but not holistic as it has many issues when applied across different sector. Those issues are as follows: 1. You can measure profit in dollar, but how do you measure social capital, environmental and ecological health? 2. how to make an index that is both comprehensive and meaningful 3. how to identify suitable data for the variables that compose the index. 4. Finding applicable data and calculating a project or policy’s contribution to sustainability 5.TBL calculates effects on society but society is a set of different culture combined together, and hence it lacks individualism. Some argues that this problem can be dealt by monetizing all the dimension of TBL, and which raises question on ethical ground, as how can one value price of endangered species and declining wetlands against dollar.
Hence the need for more holistic solution was felt. Which doesn’t consider global interaction as functioning of nature based on clockwork precision of Newtonian classical physics law but are more relatable to laws of chaos. A set of measurement that considers society as complex model and more relatable to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. acc. to which, we cannot measure everything precisely because of ambiguity between macroscopic observation and microscopic interaction. Such microscopic interaction couldn’t be covered in those three pillars to adequately reflect intrinsic complexity of our contemporary society. Many remarkable people raised their concern of such loopholes, of which Felix Guattari is one of the recognised voice. Whose concern was that this model can be practised and exercised to study development on an economic basis but it lacks human value. The need for more human dimension was expressed, and later the year that followed, the need for more human intrinsic pillar named culture gained preference. Although it has been mentioned earlier as part of sustainable development, by various global development organisation but only later did “culture” gained more momentum.
Defining the fourth Pillar of Sustainability
The world institution understood such worries and World Summit on Sustainable Development and UNESCO proposed that ‘culture’ to be included in this model of development. This understands the exercise of sustainability and sustainable design from recognition of the value of culture as an agent that characterizes both the social and physical environment –natural and built. The physical environment is the heritage, buildings, natural resources, geography, metabolism, biodiversity. The social environment are the lifestyles, ways of living, local knowledge, celebrations, traditions, symbols, myths and beliefs. We are talking about collective subjectivity as a great value for development. However, cultural sustainability also defends the expressions of individual subjectivity: creativity, diversity, freedom of expression ultimately.
So, this sustainability advocates IDENTITY as one of the main concepts on which to build sustainable development: not only from the enhancement of existing identity -embodied in the physical and social- but from the promotion of new individual and collective identities. This means, first, an economy of means and resources and, second, amplification and consolidation of cultural values.
In fact, the UNESCO already in its Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001) and, more specifically, in its Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) claimed to consider “creativity, knowledge, diversity and beauty” as unavoidable premises for the “dialogue for peace and progress, as they are intrinsically related to human development and freedom.”
The worldwide ideology on defining complex and holistic understanding of sustainability propagated policy change and it was finally adopted by United Nation on page 2 of its 1st draft document entitled ‘Accounting for Sustainability 2008’ asserting the following:
“(…) Triple bottom-line accounting is an instance of this with ecological and social sustainability being tacked on the back end of a continuing economic imperative of profitability. In the present context of global climate change, intensifying urbanization, increasing transnational insecurities and a heightening divide of rich and poor, there is a pressing need for new ways of finding a balance across the domains of economic, ecological, political and cultural sustainability.”
And in 2004 the Agenda 21 for Culture was approved, before this culture was only in silent whisper. But after passing of this document, this went on to become the founding document of Committee on culture of the world association of United cities and Local Government(UCLG), it’s a global platform for cities, organization and networks to learn, cooperate and to launch policies and programme on the role culture in sustainable development whose main objective is “to promote culture as the fourth pillar of sustainable development”.
Circle of Sustainability
With the inclusion of fourth pillar of sustainability, it established the cultural understanding of sustainability. Which led to a new way to measure and understand sustainable development called, “Circle of Sustainability”. This method is used by United Nation Global Compact Cities programme to maintain and monitor sustainability in cities and urban settlements under Cities Programme directed towards socially sustainable outcome.
This model is more focussed on cities, as its considered that cities are going to be centre of development in the future. It’s based on engaged theory and it measure sustainability in the domain of ecology, economics, politics and culture. Using these four domains we can analyse question of resilience, adaption, security, reconciliation. These four domains and their subdomain are namely as follows:
Economics
The economic domain is defined as the practices and meanings associated with the production, use, and management of resources, where the concept of ‘resources’ is used in the broadest sense of that word.
Production and resourcing
Exchange and transfer
Accounting and regulation
Consumption and use
Labour and welfare
Technology and infrastructure
Wealth and distribution
Amount of taxes paid
Ecology
The ecological domain is defined as the practices and meanings that occur across the intersection between the social and the natural realms, focusing on the important dimension of human engagement with and within nature, but also including the built-environment.
Materials and energy
Water and air
Flora and fauna
Habitat and settlements
Built-form and transport
Embodiment and sustenance
Emission and waste
Politics
The political is defined as the practices and meanings associated with basic issues of social power, such as organization, authorization, legitimation and regulation. The parameters of this area extend beyond the conventional sense of politics to include not only issues of public and private governance but more broadly social relations in general.
Organization and governance
Law and justice
Communication and critique
Representation and negotiation
Security and accord
Dialogue and reconciliation
Ethics and accountability
Culture
The cultural domain is defined as the practices, discourses, and material expressions, which, over time, express continuities and discontinuities of social meaning.
Identity and engagement
Creativity and recreation
Memory and projection
Belief and ideas
Gender and generations
Enquiry and learning
Wellbeing and health
Below, is an example of circle of sustainability measured for two of the Indian cities, New Delhi and Hyderabad.
This method helps in accessing the distance between current state of affair and the ongoing task of achieving a sustainable way of life for cities, institution or community setting. This method is supported by conceptual thought to technology supported framework, which helps in combining qualitative with quantitative framework.
The Circles approach is issue-driven, seeking to achieve the following characteristics:
Accessible. Readily interpretable to non-experts, but at deeper levels methodologically sophisticated enough to stand up against the scrutiny of experts in assessment, monitoring and evaluation and project management;
Graphic. Simple in its graphic presentation and top-level description, but simultaneously having consistent principles carrying through to its lower, more complex, and detailed levels;
Cross-locale. Sufficiently general and high-level to work across a diverse range of cities and localities, big and small, but at the same time sufficiently flexible to be used to capture the detailed specificity of each of those different places;
Learning-based. Offering ways for cities to learn from other cities, providing support and principles for exchange of knowledge and learning from practice;
Comparable. Allowing comparison between cities, without locating them in a league table or hierarchy;
Tool-generating. Providing a series of tools — including web-based electronic tools compatible with various information and communications technology platforms;
Indicator-generating. Providing guidance for selecting indicators as well as methods for assessing their outcomes;
Relational. Focussing not only on identification of critical issues, indicators that relate to those critical issues, but also the relationships between them;
Cross-domain. Compatible with new developments that bring ‘culture’ in serious contention in sustainability analysis — such as the United Cities and Local Governments’ (UCLG) four pillars of sustainability;
Participatory. Framed by a set of global protocols, while nevertheless driven by stakeholders and communities of practice;
Cross-supported. Straddling the qualitative/quantitative divide and using appropriate quantification to allow for identification of conflicts.
Standards-oriented. Connected to current and emerging reporting and modelling standards.
Curriculum-oriented. Broad enough to provide guidance for curriculum development, and therefore useful for training.
These methods are not obsolete but however they were the founding stone for Global organisation to develop policies further. Global organisation like United Nation and Global task force on sustainability are not only formulating policy but also trying to implement them as effectively as possible. In September 2015, in the framework of the ‘Post 2015 development agenda’, the UN adopted 17 goals broken down into 169 targets, designed to guide policy towards a sustainable development agenda that includes social, economic and ecological dimensions. This universal framework is intended to accompany governments, civil society and transnational structures in a common effort up to 2030. Following the successful implementation of SDGs (sustainable development goals) it would lead to better balance between today’s consumption to tomorrow’s availability. A better impartial society where poverty and hunger are the talks of past, where better economic and social practise prevails. It would lead to creation of a healthy living society, where everyone has access to education, food, reliable energy and water sources, gender equality. The ecological dimension will help for us to sustain our depleting terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity and combating climate change, while conserving our ocean and marine resources. Finally, the economic policies will ensure full employment and further innovation. The sustainable development goals are a hope and way for human and all life on earth, and a chance to undo harm what we have done, together collectively. It also provides an opportunity to reinvent and build on the humanist and emancipatory tradition of universities, to emphasize the value and agency of human beings, to prefer critical thinking over acceptance of outdated dogmas, and to promote research and education as political issues (in the best sense of the word), thereby contributing to building a fair worldwide community of emancipated citizens.
References:
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- Atu, Omimi-Ejoor Osaretin Kingsley, (2013) Triple Bottom Line Accounting: A Conceptual Expose. IOSR Journal of Business and Management (IOSR-JBM) Volume 13, Issue 4 (Sep. — Oct. 2013), PP 30–36.
- More than green. Retrieved from http://www.morethangreen.es/en/ideology/four-sustainabilities-cultural-economic-social-environmental-sustainability/#sthash.bHOPmKSQ.dpbs
- Circle of Sustainability. Retrieved fm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circles_of_Sustainability
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- Slaper, Timothy F., Ph.D & Hall, Tanya (2011) The Triple Bottom Line: What Is It and How Does It Work? Indiana Business Review, Spring 2011, Retrieved from http://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2011/spring/article2.html
