Sustainability metrics and indices

Sustainable development indicators (STD) are measures of sustainability, and attempt to quantify beyond the generic concept. Though there are disagreements among those from different disciplines (and influenced by different political beliefs about the nature of the good society), these disciplines and international organizations have each offered measures or indicators of how to measure the concept.

While sustainability indicators, indices and reporting systems gained growing popularity in both the public and private sectors, their effectiveness in influencing actual policy and practices often remains limited.

Various ways of operationalizing or measuring sustainability have been developed. During the last 10 years there has been an expansion of interest in SDI systems, both in industrialized and, albeit to a lesser extent, in developing countries. SDIs are seen as useful in a wide range of settings, by a wide range of actors: international and intergovernmental bodies; national governments and government departments; economic sectors; administrators of geographic or ecological regions; communities; nongovernmental organizations; and the private sector.

SDI processes are underpinned and driven by the increasing need for improved quality and regularly produced information with better spatial and temporal resolution. Accompanying this need is the requirement, brought in part by the information revolution, to better differentiate between information that matters in any given policy context versus information that is of secondary importance or irrelevant.

A large and still growing number of attempts to create aggregate measures of various aspects of sustainability created a stable of indices that provide a more nuanced perspective on development than economic aggregates such as GDP. Some of the most prominent of these include the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); the Ecological footprint of Global Footprint Network and its partner organizations; the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) and the pilot Environmental Performance Index (EPI) reported under the World Economic Forum (WEF); or the Genuine Progress Index (GPI) calculated at the national or sub-national level. Parallel to these initiatives, political interest in producing a green GDP that would take at least the cost of pollution and natural capital depletion into account has grown, even if implementation is held back by the reluctance of policymakers and statistical services arising mostly from a concern about conceptual and technical challenges.

...
Wikipedia