The Resilient World

The annual AAAS conference can be counted on for interesting science policy news. PhysOrg reports on a panel at AAAS tackling that perennial chestnut - sustainability. A good system of indicators for monitoring sustainability is the holy grail of the global environment and sustainable development community. (A favorite approach of mine is Robert Prescott-Allen's The Wellbeing of Nations).

A major challenge is that "human well-being" is a very elusive concept, probably falling in the realm of "wicked problems." What I mean is that one human's well-being often impinges on another's. A general definition of well-being applicable to all ends up being so general that it doesn't provide little guidance. Have we made very much progress, philosophically, since the time of FDR's "four freedoms" (1941) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)? If you had spent significant amounts of time at the United Nations listening to these debates, as I have, you would be forgiven for thinking that we may actually be moving backwards. But I digress.

One of the problems may be one of scale - the nation-state may not be the best level from which to define "human well-being." I would like to know if there is a "sweet spot" for cooperation at a particular level of social organization that would make it possible to reach a broad consensus the definition of "human well-being" (see an earlier post below for discussion on cooperation and complex societies).

I believe that resilience will be easier to describe and to measure, which is why I'm focusing on the resilient world.

 

Amplify’d from www.physorg.com

Thomas Dietz, a sociology and environmental science and policy professor at Michigan State University, took steps to indentify a universal framework to evaluate sustainability at a national gathering of scientists Feb. 20.

Measuring progress and evaluating proposals require identifying indicators that are valid and reliable. The desire to have such protocols has been around for years, but establishing criteria for measurement is a recent development, Dietz said. During the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington, D.C., Dietz led a discussion of international experts to review recent advances and address the strengths and weaknesses of current practices.

"We found that there are many different methods around the globe that are running relatively independently of one another," said Dietz, who organized the workshop with Eugene Rosa of Washington State University. "By bringing together the top researchers of leading sustainability measures, our goal is to establish a synthesis that will lead to common language and measurements to help the world evaluate whether sustainability efforts are succeeding or failing."

The unifying theme of sustainability is human well-being, how it impacts the environment and the tradeoffs of the two. While some methods focus on economics, others place higher emphasis on the environment and some do both. Yet all are complementary and wrestling with the same overarching goals, Dietz added.

"Some of the concepts are new, and others have been around a while but are becoming more sophisticated and more widely accepted," he said. "With solid data now available from most every country, which makes side-by-side comparisons easier, we felt it was the perfect time to bring everyone together to hopefully begin unifying our efforts on an international scale." Read more at www.physorg.com