Sust Metrics: Data, Construction and Use

The urgency to tackle sustainability-related global problems has revealed the growing need to create, maintain and analyze data on environmental and social issues with robust methodologies. The availability of nascent sustainability datasets and advanced data tools such as GIS, machine learning, and blockchain has expanded our capabilities for quick and agile decision-making in the sustainability space. However, compared to real-time economic data, timely and reliable environmental and social data are very much lacking. Sustainability indicators are able to transform a vast amount of information about our complex environment into concise, policy-applicable and manageable information. There is a very large universe of indicators to measure the sustainability performance of an entity, but the critical question is what to use and how many indicators should be evaluated. Sustainability indicators are either presented in a structured framework that can be used to isolate and report on relevant indicators, or aggregated towards a composite index or score/rating. The number of indicators used for assessing sustainability have proliferated, with hundreds of sustainability related indices around the world, including the Ecological Footprint, the Human Development Index, green accounting, Sustainable Development Goals, the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) co-developed by Columbia University and Yale University, the Urban Sustainability Ranking System that I helped develop, and various carbon indices.