Systems, Indicators, and Sustainability Assessment
Sustainability is related to a defined system. Sustainability assessment of a system is a determination of the sustainability performance of the system compared to a similar system with the same attributes. Indicators are representatives of the attributes
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Systems, Indicators, and Sustainability Assessment
“Measure what is measurable and make measurable what is not.” — Galileo Galilei
4.1
Introduction
We have seen in Chap. 1 that the concept of sustainability covers three domains or dimensions: economic, environmental, and societal. In each domain there can be numerous issues or factors that are of interest to us. Any sustainability consideration should start with the question: sustainability of what? To which the answer is: that of a system. There are various definitions of system. They are roughly equivalent. For instance, • Bertalanffy defines a system as “complexes of elements in interaction to which certain system laws can be applied.1 • ISO definition: a system is a set of interrelated or interacting elements.2 • Mathematically, a system S is defined as a set of object-systems composed according to relations r from a set of relations [R], with compositions laws z from a set of composition laws [Z].3 A sustainability system was defined by Brandi and Santos thus: “sustainability system as a set of interacting and comparable elements connected to create economic value and contribute to healthy ecosystems and strong communities over time”4 Each system is unique in the way of its boundary, and the particular issues embedded in the three domains that are important for its functioning. For this
1 Bertalanffy Lv (1968) General system theory: Foundations, development, applications. Braziller. New York). 2 ISO 9000:2005, Quality Management Systems – Fundamentals and Vocabulary. International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Geneva). 3 Polderman JW, Willems J (1998) Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Systems and Control. Springer, New York). 4 Brandi, HS, and Santos Sd, CTEP- DOI 10.1007/s10098-015-1044-4).
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 S.K. Sikdar et al., Measuring Progress towards Sustainability, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42719-5_4
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4 Systems, Indicators, and Sustainability Assessment
discussion, a system is an interconnected network of nature and its resources (i.e., the environment), people, and the economy. Systems from a sustainability viewpoint can be classified roughly in four categories of scale (Sikdar 2003): 1. Global systems: these systems by nature have global attributes, and hence should affect all corners of the planet. System problems of this category can only be solved at the international level with all countries cooperating with each other. The idea of sustainability emerged as a notion of global socioeconomic problem. The United Nations, through its Millennium Development Goals (MDG), started a program to encourage the nations to gradually move towards sustainability by measuring and improving upon certain prescribed indicators. Since the responsibility of making these improvements were in the hands of individual countries, the concept of sustainability was adopted at other but lower scale levels as well. 2. National and Regional: Many nations have accepted the idea of national sustainability and began
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