An assessment of agricultural sustainability indicators in Bangladesh: review and synthesis

The term ‘indicator’ is often vague and heterogeneous, and its dynamic characteristics make it highly variable over time and space. Based on reviews and synthesis, this study visualizes phenomena and highlights the trend of indicator selection criteria, development methods, validation evaluation strategies for improvement. In contextualization of the intensification of agriculture and climate change, we proposed a set of indicators for assessing agricultural sustainability in Bangladesh based on theoretically proposed and practically applied indicators by researchers. Also, this article raises several issues of indicator system development and presents a summary after due consideration. Finally, we underline multi-stakeholders’ participation in agricultural sustainability assessment.     

Is there a correct way of establishing sustainability indicators? The case of sustainability indicator development on the Island of Guernsey

Abstract

The popularity of sustainability indicators is almost inescapable. From the early pioneers such as the ‘Sustainable Seattle’ project (Atkisson, ‘Developing Indicators of a Sustainable Community: lessons from Sustainable Seattle’, in: D. Satterthwaite (Ed), The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Cities, London, Earthscan, 1996) to the comprehensive European Union benchmarking launched in 2003 (European Commission, European Common Indicators: towards a local sustainability profile, Milan, Ambiente Italia, 2003), it seems that consensus has been reached about the positive impacts that establishing sustainability indicators can bring. This paper uses the case of developing sustainability indicators on the Island of Guernsey over the last three years to show that Agenda 21's call to activate grassroots action is being realised, but in ways that are neither top-down and modernist in approach nor bottom-up and postmodernist as Agenda 21 advocates. Although best practice literature often suggests that community involvement must be engaged prior to designing sustainability indicators, this paper explores the reasons why this is not always possible. Guernsey's case is used to show how it only became possible to generate interest in the indicator process once they were actually up and running. However, it also shows that once interest was secured by a few relevant stakeholders it became possible to further evolve the indicators in a process that has slowly been attracting more and more of the Island's community.     

Indicators of Sustainability: Challenges and Opportunities at the Interface of Science and Policy

Rising global interest in sustainability has triggered attention in indicators as a means of achieving a more sustainable world. Although the search for indicators has led to the development of criteria for good indicators, it has also been dominated by scientific elites. The consequences of such dominance leads to significant social and policy implications, particularly with regard to how the search for sustainability has become defined primarily as a technical/scientific exploration when it is actually a moral and ethical issue. Our discussion about sustainability and appropriate indicators centers on what constitutes the public interest, a question that requires inclusiveness and centers on the interface of science and policy. The paper reviews the rationale for selecting indicators, the functions they serve, and the implications and consequences involved when one sector—science—dominates the debate. The paper concludes with suggestions about appropriate roles of science, policy and the public in the indicator selection process.     

Understanding urban vulnerability,adaptation and resilience in the context of climate change

This paper introduces a special issue of Local Environment that has arisen through collaboration between academic researchers and the Urban Planning and Design Branch of UN-Habitat, focused on how we can understand and respond to the challenges of urban vulnerability, adaptation and resilience in the context of climate change. The paper establishes the existing state of the art in the field, and considers critical challenges that are emerging in the research-based literature. In this context, it introduces UN-Habitat's Cities and Climate Change Initiative and reflects on the lessons learnt and challenges ahead, drawing on insights from across the papers in the special issue. In conclusion, it identifies the role of international/transnational co-operation, the relation between adaptation and mitigation, issues of multi-level governance and the ways in which change in urban socio-technical systems might be achieved as critical issues across the science/policy interface where increased dialogue and the co-production of knowledge needs to focus in order to advance this agenda.     

The Use of Local Sustainability Indicators: case studies in two Swedish municipalities1

This article contributes to the debate on the role of local sustainability indicators in ongoing democratisation efforts. We examine the extent to which five different systems of local sustainability indicators within two Swedish municipalities—Stockholm and Sundsvall—are either expert or citizen oriented, and relate these findings to the indicator systems' profile, function and political/ administrative context. Even though three of the indicator systems can be classified as citizen oriented, there are few signs of true engagement and dialogue with the citizens over a longer period of time. The remaining two indicator systems are expert oriented with an environmental focus. Hence, we conclude that the systems in use are largely symbolic responses to the demands for democracy within the agenda for sustainable development albeit attempts to include environmental, economic, social and democratic perspectives of sustainability. Despite the fact that Stockholm and Sundsvall show differences in governing styles in their approaches to sustainability indicators it seems difficult for both municipalities to put sustainable development into practice in terms of citizen participation.     

The Use of Local Sustainability Indicators: case studies in two Swedish municipalities1

This article contributes to the debate on the role of local sustainability indicators in ongoing democratisation efforts. We examine the extent to which five different systems of local sustainability indicators within two Swedish municipalities—Stockholm and Sundsvall—are either expert or citizen oriented, and relate these findings to the indicator systems' profile, function and political/ administrative context. Even though three of the indicator systems can be classified as citizen oriented, there are few signs of true engagement and dialogue with the citizens over a longer period of time. The remaining two indicator systems are expert oriented with an environmental focus. Hence, we conclude that the systems in use are largely symbolic responses to the demands for democracy within the agenda for sustainable development albeit attempts to include environmental, economic, social and democratic perspectives of sustainability. Despite the fact that Stockholm and Sundsvall show differences in governing styles in their approaches to sustainability indicators it seems difficult for both municipalities to put sustainable development into practice in terms of citizen participation.     

Communicating About Bioenergy Sustainability

Defining and measuring sustainability of bioenergy systems are difficult because the systems are complex, the science is in early stages of development, and there is a need to generalize what are inherently context-specific enterprises. These challenges, and the fact that decisions are being made now, create a need for improved communications among scientists as well as between scientists and decision makers. In order for scientists to provide information that is useful to decision makers, they need to come to an agreement on how to measure and report potential risks and benefits of diverse energy alternatives in a way that allows decision makers to compare options. Scientists also need to develop approaches that contribute information about problems and opportunities relevant to policy and decision making. The need for clear communication is especially important at this time when there is a plethora of scientific papers and reports and it is difficult for the public or decision makers to assess the merits of each analysis. We propose three communication guidelines for scientists whose work can contribute to decision making: (1) relationships between the question and the analytical approach should be clearly defined and make common sense; (2) the information should be presented in a manner that non-scientists can understand; and (3) the implications of methods, assumptions, and limitations should be clear. The scientists’ job is to analyze information to build a better understanding of environmental, cultural, and socioeconomic aspects of the sustainability of energy alternatives. The scientific process requires transparency, debate, review, and collaboration across disciplines and time. This paper serves as an introduction to the papers in the special issue on “Sustainability of Bioenergy Systems: Cradle to Grave” because scientific communication is essential to developing more sustainable energy systems. Together these four papers provide a framework under which the effects of bioenergy can be assessed and compared to other energy alternatives to foster sustainability.     

Sustainability and education for sustainability: An analysis of publications from the last decade

This study analyzes the characteristics of publications on sustainability topics and education for sustainability in the Web of Science (WOS) database during the period ranging from 2005 to 2014. We identified the topics that are being studied within those subjects and other relevant topics. We also analyzed a special edition of the Journal of Cleaner Production on “Higher Education for Sustainable Development: Emerging areas,” published in January, 2014. Our approach was both qualitative and quantitative and aimed at qualifying and quantifying certain variables related to the scientific literature on the broad subject of sustainability. The number of published pieces in the WOS focusing on sustainability issues during the period from 2005 to 2014 was 5,924. In our analysis of the special edition of the Journal of Cleaner Production, we found and analyzed 17 abstracts and full papers. The main results of our survey highlight the education, educational research, environmental sciences, ecology, and engineering areas as including the greatest number of publications. Articles, as opposed to conference proceedings or reviews, accounted for 63% of the published documents, and the year 2013 showed the largest number of publications. Huisingh, Suciu, Katane, and Barth are the most published authors on these topics. Furthermore, management, environmental studies, ecology, and environmental sciences are the “hot topics” with the best search results, meaning articles of impact and high quality. Finally, it should be emphasized that publications on the subject of sustainability appear most often in the sciences.     

Development of sustainability indicators by communities in China: a case study of Chongming County,Shanghai

Public participation as a means of identifying sustainability indicators for Chongming County, Shanghai, China was evaluated by an international group drawing on established best practice. An initial 'long list' of 86 sustainability indicators, based on previous indicator systems developed in China, was identified. This 'long list' was reduced via consultations with local academics and local-government officers from Shanghai City and Chongming County to a 'short list' of 17 indicators. This short-list was subjected to further community consultation involving 159 local-government officers, teachers, students (aged 12-14 years), farmers and workers. Data from the consultations indicated differences in the understanding of sustainable development among the different sectors. By combining the data from the different sectors it was possible to identify a consensus around 4 core and 7 additional indicators. These are proposed as indicators which could be used to steer local activities directed towards sustainable development. The list of indicators produced by the people of Chongming Island was compared to local indicator systems in Europe. In comparison with European lists the Chongming list was found to have a greater emphasis on economic development but a similar level of concern for environmental matters. This study has special significance as it reports on the implementation of a process involving local resident participation in the process of sustainable development in China.     

Energy indicators and sustainable development: The International Energy Agency approach

The International Energy Agency (IEA), together with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), UN‐DESA, Eurostat and the European Environmental Agency, has recently published a comprehensive joint‐agency overview of energy indicators for sustainable development. The IEA's contribution to this publication is based on the IEA energy indicator approach. This approach has been developed and used by the IEA over a number of years. The indicators advocated by the IEA are relatively disaggregated to allow for meaningful analysis of sustainability issues in the energy sector. Using a decomposition approach helps reveal the causal links between human/economic driving forces, energy use and emissions. This article presents examples of IEA's work with indicators and an overview of the methodology used, including an explanation of the link to sustainable development. It also provides an example of a simplified indicator analysis of India, to illustrate the importance of improved data systems in developing indicators that can provide meaningful policy analysis.     

Sustainability indicator system and policy processes in Malaysia: a framework for utilisation and learning

Formulation of effective sustainability indicators for national assessment demands a comprehensive understanding of the utilisation, diffusion and dissemination of information in policy processes. To illustrate the dynamic of sustainability assessment within the context of policy processes, this paper uses a case study of national sustainability indicators development in Malaysia. Subsequently, this paper ascribes the limited achievement of national sustainability assessment in Malaysia to four types of constraints: meta-policy issues; technical capacities; communication concerns; and the inherent knowledge gaps within the indicator developer community vis-a-vis their theoretical limitations. It is proposed that such constraints will be encountered in many countries. Drawing from the literature on public policy, this paper outlines a framework for investigating indicator behaviour within policy processes based on well-established concepts such as knowledge utilisation and policy learning. I conclude this paper by elaborating on the corresponding future challenges that must be addressed before effective integration of sustainability indicators within policy systems can occur.     

Measuring an Organization's Performance: The Road to Defining Sustainability Indicators

This article proposes an integrated procedure to assess sustainability indicators that organizations can use to satisfy international requirements for sustainability. The indicators are related to key aspects of organizations, and their development includes comparing them to the results and policies of various other organizations that are seeking to achieve sustainability. The methodology we used is based on a bibliographic review, and it is intended to:

• Diagnose the state of the art of organizational sustainability,
• Provide organizations with tools to perform benchmarking based on the results, and
• Provide processes to identify best sustainability practices.

After benchmarking, organization managers will be able to adjust the methodology to quantify the sustainability indicators that are most suited to their organization's profile in regard to the activities, products, and services that it offers. Critical factors for organizational sustainability are identified and integrated into the systematic approach proposed in this article to assess indicators, communicate results, and make recommendations for corrective action and continual improvement considering the organization's baseline condition (the starting condition of the organization).     

Drivers of agricultural sustainability in developing countries: a review

Agricultural development has been an effective instrument for poverty alleviation and economic development in developing countries over the latter half of the twentieth century, and over 80 % of rural people globally still depend on agriculture for their living. However, issues such as water availability, land degradation and an increasing dependence on chemical fertilisers and pesticides continue to be on-going threats to sustainable agricultural development. These threats are being driven by the pressing need to ensure food security in the face of rapidly growing and urbanising populations. Developing countries will therefore continue to need improved methods for planning sustainable agricultural development. This paper presents a review of agricultural sustainability assessment in developing countries. The review highlights some of the key weaknesses that persist in sustainability assessment and the need to consider not only indicators of sustainability but also the drivers that influence indicator behaviour. We argue that without a good understanding of the drivers of sustainability and their systemic relationships to indicators, sustainability assessments run the risk of focusing on symptoms without addressing underlying causes of adverse indicator trends. Drivers of agricultural sustainability in developing countries encompass a range of demographic, natural, socio-economic, political, institutional and management factors. Understanding these and their relationships to sustainability indicators is needed in order to develop agricultural development policy that supports sustainability. The paper presents a conceptual framework for guiding systemic agricultural sustainability assessment and agricultural development planning in developing countries that includes both sustainability indicators and drives, and considers the broad relationships between them.     

Is there a correct way of establishing sustainability indicators? The case of sustainability indicator development on the Island of Guernsey

The popularity of sustainability indicators is almost inescapable. From the early pioneers such as the 'Sustainable Seattle' project (Atkisson, 'Developing Indicators of a Sustainable Community: lessons from Sustainable Seattle', in: D. Satterthwaite (Ed), The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Cities, London, Earthscan, 1996) to the comprehensive European Union benchmarking launched in 2003 (European Commission, European Common Indicators: towards a local sustainability profile, Milan, Ambiente Italia, 2003), it seems that consensus has been reached about the positive impacts that establishing sustainability indicators can bring. This paper uses the case of developing sustainability indicators on the Island of Guernsey over the last three years to show that Agenda 21's call to activate grassroots action is being realised, but in ways that are neither top-down and modernist in approach nor bottom-up and postmodernist as Agenda 21 advocates. Although best practice literature often suggests that community involvement must be engaged prior to designing sustainability indicators, this paper explores the reasons why this is not always possible. Guernsey's case is used to show how it only became possible to generate interest in the indicator process once they were actually up and running. However, it also shows that once interest was secured by a few relevant stakeholders it became possible to further evolve the indicators in a process that has slowly been attracting more and more of the Island's community.     

From issues to indicators: developing robust community sustainability measures

Recent debate on sustainability indicator development has centred upon top-down and bottom-up methods. In practice, a key difficulty is the establishment of defensible issues and indicators to use. Here, we present a structured approach for transitioning from initial community consultation designed to elicit issues to the downstream definition, composition and measurement of those issues via indicators. The approach incorporates two quantitative techniques from the literature, analytic hierarchy process and Qualitative Sustainability System Index. The application of these techniques is designed to foster a better understanding of the priority of and relationships between issues, prior to the construction of measurement instruments and indicators of sustainability. We develop a prototype implementation of the approach, and elicit feedback from an expert panel on its suitability in a community sustainability context.     

Environmental Indicators of Biofuel Sustainability: What About Context?

Indicators of the environmental sustainability of biofuel production, distribution, and use should be selected, measured, and interpreted with respect to the context in which they are used. The context of a sustainability assessment includes the purpose, the particular biofuel production and distribution system, policy conditions, stakeholder values, location, temporal influences, spatial scale, baselines, and reference scenarios. We recommend that biofuel sustainability questions be formulated with respect to the context, that appropriate indicators of environmental sustainability be developed or selected from more generic suites, and that decision makers consider context in ascribing meaning to indicators. In addition, considerations such as technical objectives, varying values and perspectives of stakeholder groups, indicator cost, and availability and reliability of data need to be understood and considered. Sustainability indicators for biofuels are most useful if adequate historical data are available, information can be collected at appropriate spatial and temporal scales, organizations are committed to use indicator information in the decision-making process, and indicators can effectively guide behavior toward more sustainable practices.     

Community Sustainability Auditing

This paper presents a method for assessing a community's sustainability prospects at a point in time. It argues that an improved methodology is needed to support the development of local area indicators. The method presented is community sustainability auditing. The ethical, conservative, competitive and co-operative aspects of sustainability are emphasized.The method uses an indicator approach within a protocol loosely inspired by International Standards Organization procedures. This involves the development of a set of questions for audit purposes, definition of indicators, analysis of the indicators in the light of the questions and a report summarizing a community's sustainability prospects.     

An innovative sustainability assessment for urban wastewater infrastructure and its application in Chengdu, China

Sustainability assessments are an increasingly common tool for measuring progress towards sustainable development. Despite their popularity, sustainability assessments and the indicators that compose them are said to have had little impact on the policy arena. In this paper we discuss four attributes that we contend will improve the use of sustainability assessments to guide decision making: non-compartmentalization, site specificity, built-in guidance for target setting, and ability to measure active sustainability. We present a novel assessment tool for wastewater treatment infrastructure that illustrates these attributes. The assessment is composed of two-dimensional indicators we call “burden to capacity” ratios, that reveal and quantify the local value of resources embodied in wastewater and treatment byproducts, and the tradeoffs between designing systems for disposal versus reuse. We apply the sustainability assessment framework to an existing treatment plant in Chengdu, China and discuss the results.     

Bottom up and top down: analysis of participatory processes for sustainability indicator identification as a pathway to community empowerment and sustainable environmental management

The modern environmental management literature stresses the need for community involvement to identify indicators to monitor progress towards sustainable development and environmental management goals. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of participatory processes on sustainability indicator identification and environmental management in three disparate case studies. The first is a process of developing partnerships between First Nations communities, environmental groups, and forestry companies to resolve conflicts over forest management in Western Canada. The second describes a situation in Botswana where local pastoral communities worked with development researchers to reduce desertification. The third case study details an on-going government led process of developing sustainability indicators in Guernsey, UK, that was designed to monitor the environmental, social, and economic impacts of changes in the economy. The comparative assessment between case studies allows us to draw three primary conclusions. (1) The identification and collection of sustainability indicators not only provide valuable databases for making management decisions, but the process of engaging people to select indicators also provides an opportunity for community empowerment that conventional development approaches have failed to provide. (2) Multi-stakeholder processes must formally feed into decision-making forums or they risk being viewed as irrelevant by policy-makers and stakeholders. (3) Since ecological boundaries rarely meet up with political jurisdictions, it is necessary to be flexible when choosing the scale at which monitoring and decision-making occurs. This requires an awareness of major environmental pathways that run through landscapes to understand how seemingly remote areas may be connected in ways that are not immediately apparent.     

Metabolisms of injustice: municipal solid-waste management and environmental equity in Barcelona's Metropolitan Region

Environmental justice studies that focus on the management of municipal solid waste (MSW) typically examine the unequal distribution of associated health and environmental risks in minority social groups and the political processes that generate these inequalities. With the aim to complement current views on the field, in this work, we explore whether there is an issue of environmental justice in municipal systems' grade of self-sufficiency in treating the MSW that they generate and in their effort to close their material cycles. The methodology used is based on the concept of urban metabolism and is applied to 12 coastal municipalities of Barcelona's Metropolitan Region in Spain. The metabolism of the MSW flows of each system is analysed to examine (i) the system's efficiency to close its MSW cycles, corresponding to an indicator of environmental sustainability, and (ii) the MSW export and import flows, as an indicator of social sustainability. The results demonstrate a positive correlation between socioeconomic status and the externalisation of MSW treatment-related hazards. The proposed indicator proves to be an excellent tool for the evaluation of both the environmental and social performance of a system considering MSW management.