Monitoring Sustainability and Targeting Interventions: Indicators, Planetary Boundaries, Benefits and Costs

Abstract

This article shows how sustainability indicators (SIs) which have proliferated, and downscaled planetary boundaries (DPBs) which have recently emerged, can be used to target remedial interventions. I offer an integrative analysis drawing upon the existing literature, challenging, clarifying, and amending it in some ways, and extending it with new insights. The exposition is couched in the example of pollution control, but the analysis also applies to resource management with only modest amendments. Key conclusions are summarized. (i) In a default case where damage is indifferent to location within the problem shed and transactions costs are trivial, minimizing abatement costs requires that all units face the same marginal price of emissions and can be implemented by price setting at the jurisdictional level or cap and trade in pollution reduction credits. Larger geographic scale tends to reduce the average cost of abatement, an argument for coordination at the problem-shed level. Deviations from the default policy may be appropriate for addressing large point sources and local hot spots where damage is concentrated. (ii) A framework winnowing the proliferation of SIs includes the following principles: for quantitative target setting, SIs should address sustainability in its long-term context; SIs should be measured in ratio scale, whereas ordinal-scale SIs are common; and SIs should be selected for their usefulness in mapping the relationships among emissions, ambient concentrations, and damage. (iii) Target setting requires science-based empirical relationships and social values to assess trade-offs between abatement and its opportunity costs and suggest upper limits on tolerable damage. (iv) PBs that address global public goods can usefully be downscaled to set abatement targets. The PBs are science based and, in their original form, propose replacing social values with imperatives: violating the PB will doom the planet, which is unacceptable given any plausible value system. Given that PB = ∑DPB over all jurisdictions, global trading of credits would minimize costs of honoring the PB. Trade among a willing subset of jurisdictions could minimize the costs of meeting its aggregate DPB. (v) In contrast to most SI approaches, a cost–benefit (CB) approach can deal with substitutability and complementarity among sustainability objectives and evaluate multi-component policies. Net benefits are maximized when the marginal cost of abatement equals the marginal benefit for all units in the problem shed. This can be attained by price setting at the jurisdictional level or trade in credits. (vi) A major advantage of the CB approach is its well-defined relationship to weak sustainability. However, its value measures over-weight the preferences of the well-off. Equity considerations suggest relief from strict CB criteria in the case of essentials such as human health and nutrition, and subsidization by rich countries of sustainability projects in low-income countries.

Resource Scarcity and Sustainability—The Shapes Have Shifted but the Stakes Keep Rising

“…Practical policy to promote sustainability requires science-based information that maps changes in resource stocks to ambient conditions and the wellbeing of human and natural systems, and information on the values and aspirations of the people served by policy. Sustainability indicators, especially, have proliferated to the point where we have perhaps too much data and too little notion of how best to use it in sustainability assessment [64]. Lists of indicators may include several hundred, especially if a broad sustainable development agenda is pursued [65,66].…”

“…Already, there is a literature reviewing and assessing the indicators that have been proposed [69,70]. My suggestions for winnowing the indicators to identify the most useful include favoring (i) indicators addressed to sustainability per se rather than the broader-based concept of sustainable development, (ii) ratio-scaled indicators that measure extraction (or emissions), ambient conditions, and consequences for human and natural systems, and (iii) indicators useful in mapping the key science-based relationships [64].…”

“…There is now a modest growth industry in downscaled PBs, DPBs [71][72][73], which have been proposed as ways of distributing responsibility for the planet down to regional and local levels where citizens might more readily become engaged: "Think globally, act locally." As with sustainability indicators, a literature assessing DPBs is emerging [64,74]. The choice of denominator for downscaling provides opportunity to reflect a variety of human valuese.g., egalitarianism, efficiency, or responsibility-in the downscaling process.…”

“…The choice of denominator for downscaling provides opportunity to reflect a variety of human valuese.g., egalitarianism, efficiency, or responsibility-in the downscaling process. Recently, I have argued [64] that DPBs are most useful in addressing global public goods (greenhouse gases, atmospheric aerosols, and ocean acidification), and make relatively little sense for resources that often are best managed at the problem shed level (e.g., freshwater and urban greenspace).…”

Evaluation of global techno-socio-economic policies for the FEW nexus with an optimal control based approach

“…A similar study focusing on the land-water resource allocation space evaluated social, economic, and environmental goals in a sugarcane production setting with an uncertain yield in Thailand by applying multi-objective optimization techniques improved on the social and economic goals through informed policy-making (Amaruchkul, 2021). Randall (2021) proposed a cost-benefit optimization approach to sustainability by integrating humans and nature, planetary boundary, and utilizing sustainability indicators to evaluate the benefits of a policy on the overall welfare of the system. Structured burden-shifting policymaking is necessary to observe impacts across several sustainability indicators instead of a singular objective focused policy (Algunaibet and Guillén-Gosálbez, 2019).…”