Seeing environmental injustices: the mechanics, devices and assumptions of environmental sustainability indices and indicators

Abstract

At the heart of any colonization project, and therefore any move to de-colonize, are ways of seeing nature and society, that then allow particular ways of governing each. This is plainly visible in a number of tools that exist to measure progress towards (or regress from) environmental sustainability. The tools use indices and indicators constructed mostly by environmental scientists and ecologists. As such, they are not neutral scientific instruments: they reflect the worldviews of their creators. These worldviews depend on three dimensions: the values they prioritize, the explanatory theories they use and the futures they envision. Through these means different tools produce conflicting notions of the sustainability of our economies and societies. In this article, we shed light onto the theoretical and epistemological assumptions that lie behind key international sustainability indices and indicators: the Environmental Performance Index,Domestic Material Consumption, Material Intensity, the Material Footprint, the Carbon Footprint, the Ecological Footprint and CO2 emissions (territorial). The variables included in these indices, the way they are measured, aggregated and weighted all imply a particular way of understanding the relationships between economy, society and environment. This divergence is most clearly visible in the fact that some indices are negatively correlated with each other. Where one index might plot growing environmental sustainability, another shows its decline. Our results highlight that those devices and the theories informing them are particularly interesting for way how colonialism is materialized. Some of these measurements hide the material roots of prosperity and the ecological (and economic) distributional conflicts exported to the poorer countries by the global North, and others show how its production and consumption levels are reliant upon a socio-ecological 'subsidy' imposed on Southern countries. These subsidies represent injustices that present a primafacie case for decolonizing indices and indicators of environmental governance.

Social representations on the environment and socio-metabolic regimes: The case of the Spanish state

“…The material footprint, in contrast, accounts for the amount of materials required along the supply chains of all the goods and services finally consumed in a country. Thus, the material footprint is better at capturing the broader role in the global economy played by any one country (Requena-i-Mora & Borckinton, 2021).…”

“…Ecomodernism and post-materialism claim that growth is not the problem but the solution to the environmental crises (Gomez-Baggethun & Naredo, 2015). These ideas combine to promote a particular form of environmentalism that is characteristic of wealthy and modern societies; it is both produced by and justifying of the economic growth that creates it (Requena-i-Mora & Brockington, 2021). It assumes an elastic supply of material goods and that technological change and post-materialism can decouple economic growth from using natural resources.…”

A panacea to unsustainable consumption? A review of resource caps

“…However, a policy closely monitoring the consumption of each individual may be seen as draconian in more democratic states where individual liberty may be highly valued, and unless enacted with broad public support may draw comparisons to China's Social Credit System. Additionally, it seems doubtful that such a system could accurately account for the vastly differing environmental impacts of different resources, particularly as current measurements of environmental impact such as material footprint, ecological footprint, and environmental performance index are incongruent (Requena-i-Mora & Brockington, 2021). This is much more complicated than with carbon where at the very least caps and other climate policies can be set to achieve certain carbon emission targets following for example the Paris 2050 1.5°C target (e.g.…”