Towards sustainable development: Indicators to measure progress

Sustainable development emerged from the UN Conference on Environment and Development (1992) and has garnered great interest within the international public policy-making community. In the 1990s, sustainable development came to the top of the international and domestic policy agendas, where regional and sectoral sustainability plans have been developed. A continuing need in the transition to global sustainability is the lack of suitable metrics with which to ensure progress. Assessing a facility, a city, a country, or a region with regard to sustainability will require the development of systems approaches for which very few relationships have yet been developed. Sustainability is associated with analytical, relational and informational challenges. The measurement of sustainable development requires drawing together indicators from the three dimensions of sustainable development: the economy, the environment and the society. It involves not only single-issue complexities but also those involving multiple behaviors and impacts (environmental-economic, environmental-social, economic-social) and varying scales (local, regional, global). Hundreds of sustainability indicator sets have been developed, from those created by the United Nations to those by rural communities. Still, they have far from being universally accepted or widely used. This paper reviews the efforts undertaken by the world community to advance the concepts of sustainability and develop relevant indicators. It concludes that there is still a great need to develop scientific methods of analysis and metrics that address society's ability to link environmental, economic and social activities in a manner that can guide progress towards sustainability.