In september last year, the journal Ecological Economics published a paper on “Measuring sustainable development — Nation by nation.” The researchers came up with a way to normalize and measure the progress of sustainable development, no matter where it was taking place:
[W]e use the UN Human Development Index (HDI) as an indicator of development and the Ecological Footprint as an indicator of human demand on the biosphere. We argue that an HDI of no less than 0.8 and a per capita Ecological Footprint less than the globally available biocapacity per person represent minimum requirements for sustainable development that is globally replicable.
The potential of a standard global measure of the success of sustainable development is an intriguing proposition, especially if and as more nations get serious about cutting the impacts of development on biodiversity and the climate; it has the potential to render transparent a lot of complex development schemes, and to bring hard and fast meaning to squishy terminology like, well, “sustainable development.”Read more at Worldchanging….
