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Development of a community sustainability visualization tool through integration of US EPA’s Sustainable and Health Community Research Program tasks
Citation:
Russell, M. AND L. Smith. Development of a community sustainability visualization tool through integration of US EPA’s Sustainable and Health Community Research Program tasks. Presented at Ecosystem Services Partnership Conference 2012, July 31 - August 04, 2012.
Impact/Purpose:
We are proposing a 2-day session combining multiple components of an ongoing integrative research program in USEPA’s Office of Research and Development into a functional community sustainability visualization and assessment tool.
Description:
We propose a 2-day session combining multiple components of an ongoing integrative research program in USEPA’s Office of Research and Development into a functional community sustainability visualization and assessment tool. The working group will include project leads for a US Human Wellbeing Index, a National Ecosystem Services Classification System, final ecosystem goods and services, an ecosystem services production function library, modeling efforts linking management alternatives to ecological production functions, national atlas and community-scale mapping, community typology, community engagement tool development, and select USEPA regional community sustainability representatives, stakeholders, and other interested parties. We will integrate these components to develop a surface of community sustainability, based on the Economic, Social, and Environmental pillars of sustainability, to enable any community to place themselves on a “surface” of sustainability in a simplified, visual manner. A community’s current state of wellbeing quantified by an eight domain scoring system and combined into a US index, will be compared to predicted future scores from modeling wellbeing trajectories based on alternative management scenarios and their consequences for the sustained production of ecosystem goods and services. Value hierarchies will be adjustable to refine score weighting for different community types identified in our typology. Visualization includes a “surface” of sustainability zones derived from potential combinations of economic, social, and environmental elements. Each community’s current wellbeing index score will be represented by a symbol superimposed over the surface. The comparison between a community’s score and its location over a zone represents how resilient or vulnerable that community is to changes in their wellbeing state.