3 Name two metrics for assessing sustainability Describe how

3. Name two metrics for assessing sustainability. Describe how each metric is used, and discuss at least one issue with each metric.

Solution

The two commonly used metrics for assessing sustainability are:

The main issue with life-cycle assessment is that we can not reduce every factor to a number and then can insert into a model. Also, it involves rigid system boundaries and hence accounting for the changes in the system is difficult. A holistic representative sampling is also difficult to visualize.There are several assumptions involved while calculating the life-cycle variables and these may hamper with an accurate assessment too.

2. Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) : It is a way to measure the overall progress towards the environmental sustainability. It is a composite index which tracks 21 elements of environmental sustainability ranging from past and present pollution levels, natural endowments to a society\'s capacity to improve its environmental performance over a time period.The ESI has been developed for most of the countries around the world and hence a comparison can be done among these countries.

The main problem with this index (or any index for that matter) is that a same index can not tell you the whole story. An index depends heavily on the representative nature of the sampling. If the sampling is highly biased, the index will also be skewed. It depends on subjective judgements to weigh only a few of numerous variables and hence sometimes accuracy can not be as high as expected before.