Development of a multidisciplinary approach to assess regional sustainability

There are a number of established, scientifically supported metrics of sustainability. Many of the metrics are data-intensive and require extensive effort to collect data and compute the metrics. Moreover, individual metrics do not capture all aspects of a system that are relevant to sustainability. A pilot project was initiated to create an approach to measure, monitor, and maintain prosperity and environmental quality of a regional system. The goal was to produce a straightforward, inexpensive methodology that is simple to use and interpret. This requires historical data be readily accessible, metrics must be applicable to the relevant scale, and results must meet the needs of decision-makers. Because sustainability is a multidimensional concept, the research group consisted of a multidisciplinary team that identified the major components of an environmental system. We selected metrics to capture the multidimensionality of sustainability in environmental systems and included: (1) emergy to capture the q...