SUSTAINABILITY

INDICATORS

Submitted by
A.Poornima
 Sustainability
• Sustainability focuses on meeting the needs of
the present without compromising the ability
of future generations to meet their needs.
•  The concept of sustainability is composed of
three pillars: economic, environmental, and
social—also known informally as profits,
planet, and people. 
Environmental,social,economical
Sustainability
 Models of sustainable
developement
• The Three Pillars basic model
• The egg of sustainable model
• AtKisson’s pyramid model
• The prism model of sustainability
• The amoeba model
 The egg of sustainability 

• The egg of sustainability illustrates the relationship between

people and ecosystem as one circle inside another, like the
yolk of an egg. This implies that people are within the
ecosystem, and that ultimately one is entirely dependent upon
the other.
 Atkisson's Pyramid Model

• Atkisson's Pyramid Model The Structure of

the Pyramid guides through the process of first building a
firm base of understanding, searching for and collecting
relevant information and ideas, and then focusing and
narrowing down to what is important, effective, doable, and
something that everyone can agree in.
The 'prism of sustainable development

• The 'prism of sustainable development', or sometimes called the four

pillars model, adapted from Spangenberg and Bonniot (1998)
stipulates four dimensions:
• Economic dimension (man-made capital)
• Environmental dimension (natural capital), and
• Social dimension (human capital)
• Institutional(Social capital)
 Hartwick's rule

• In resource economics, Hartwick's rule defines the amount

of investment in produced capital (buildings, roads,
knowledge stocks, etc.) that is needed to exactly offset
declining stocks of non-renewable resources.
• This investment is undertaken so that the standard of living
does not fall as society moves into the indefinite future
•  Solow (1974) shows that, given a degree of substitutability
between produced capital and natural resources, one way
to design a sustainable consumption program for an
economy is to accumulate produced capital sufficiently
rapidly so that the pinch from the shrinking exhaustible
resource stock is precisely countered by the services from
the enlarged produced capital stock.
• Hartwick's rule – often abbreviated as "invest resource rents" –
requires that a nation invest all rent earned from exhaustible
resources currently extracted, where "rent" is defined along
paths that maximize returns to owners of the resource stock.
• The rule extends to the case of many types of capital goods,
including a vector of stocks of natural capital.
• The difference between total investment in some kinds of capital
and total disinvestment in other types of capital has been
labelled "genuine savings".
• Genuine savings has been estimated for many countries by the 
World Bank and other authors (Hamilton and Atkinson, 2006,
chapter 6).
• A positive value for a nation's genuine savings has been linked
to the possibility of long-run economic sustainability.
 Green gross domestic product

• The green gross domestic product (green GDP or GGDP)

is an index of economic growth with the environmental
consequences of that growth factored into a country's
conventional GDP.
• Green GDP monetizes the loss of biodiversity, and
accounts for costs caused by climate change.
• Some environmental experts prefer physical indicators
(such as "waste per capita" or "carbon dioxide emissions
 per year"), which may be aggregated to indices such as
the "Sustainable Development Index
• Green GDP is calculated by subtracting net
natural capital consumption from the
standard GDP. This includes resource depletion,
environmental degradation and protective
environmental initiatives
• The main purposes of Green GDP accounting are
to provide a more correct measure of welfare and
to examine the sustainability of the economy.
Now, Green GDP accounting has become a
significant basis to develop and implement the
sustainable development strategies in the world.
 Sustainability indicators
• Sustainability indicator can be defined as a
measurable aspect of environmental,
economic, or social systems that is useful for
monitoring changes in system characteristics
relevant to the continuation of human
and environmental well being
• Indicators quantify and simplify phenomena
to help us understand complex situation and
system
• Indicators translate knowledge and data into manageble
units of information that can facilitate the decision making
process
• In sustainable development indicators are used to
measure and calibrate progress to define goals and
objectives

Types of Indicators
• Qualitative
• Quantitative
• Warning
• State
• Temporal
Qualitative Indicator
• Qualitative indicator do not inform about specific
data, rather then they only give qualitative
information that refeclt the result of an appraisal of
the series of circumstance
Quantitative Indicators
• Quantitative Indicators are based on specific
mesurable data technically determined as a result of
several variables combined,or uncombained
State indicators
• It shows the state of achievement relative to a goal.
• It tell how close or how far something from a goal
Warning Indicators
• Warning Indicators is often a visual message that an action will
occur, or that a result will occur because of an particular action.
• The message appear as aresult of an action

• Temporal Indicators
• Indicators taken over time may also reveal a relationship or
trend over that time, and these are referred to as temporal
indicators

• The basic functions of indicators

• I. Simplification
• II. Quantification
• III. Communication
Social,Economic,Environmental Indicators
 Sustainability indicators
• United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development, Rio de Janeiro, 1992.
• The first set of sustainability indicators(CSD
indicators) was developed in 1995 by the
Division for Sustainable Development (DSD)
and the Statistics Division of UN Department
of Economic and Social Affairs. – It was a set of
134 indicators
• The latest review of CSD indicators was that of 2006
• The CSD indicators are organized in 14 themes (with 44
subthemes): poverty, governance, health, education,
demographics, atmosphere, land, oceans, seas, coasts,
freshwater, biodiversity, economic development, natural
hazards, global partnership, and consumption and
production patterns.
Indicators must fulfill three criteria.
• I. they cover issues that are relevant for sustainable
development in most countries.
• II. they provide critical information normally not available.
• III. they can be calculated by most countries with data
that is either readily available or could be made available
within reasonable time and costs.
 CSD indicator themes
• Poverty • Oceans, seas and coasts
• Governance • Freshwater
• Health • Biodiversity
• Education • Economic development
• Demographics • Global economic
• Natural hazards partnership
• Atmosphere • Consumption and
• Land production patterns
Thank You