You are here:
Sustainability at the community level: Searching for common ground as a part of a national strategy for decision support
Citation:
Fulford, R., M. Russell, J. Harvey, AND M. Harwell. Sustainability at the community level: Searching for common ground as a part of a national strategy for decision support. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-16/178, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
This report contains the results of a multiyear investigation into similarities and differences among communities based on the application of ecosystem goods and services and human well-being concepts to sustainable decision making. These similarities and differences, when applied to community types, provide a framework for engaging communities on decision making across the country that takes into account local priorities but also targets a national impact by identifying common priorities, access to environmental resources, and measures of sustainability.
Description:
The Sustainable and Healthy Communities (SHC) research program is intended to support resource sustainability and decision making at the community level. Sustainability is defined as the ability of a community to meet present needs without compromising the ability of society and the environment to meet the economic, social, and environmental needs of future generations. The USEPA and its partners seek a national strategy that maximizes impacts by identifying common ground among communities that can inform the decision process. In this report, communities are compared based on four distinct metrics (community type; human well-being index; stakeholder priorities; and availability of ecosystem goods and services) with the purpose of seeking common ground for defining and measuring sustainability at the local scale. Overlying this comparison is the question of the usefulness of a community classification system (CCS) for generalizing the findings to new communities. Community type was found to be informative regarding the relative importance of elements of well-being. Two major delineations of community type are considered here. First is geographic, or simply asking if place defines how communities measure well-being. The second was the CCS described in report Section 2. We then examine whether values of a specific measure of well-being, the human well-being index (HWBI), differ either geographically or by community type. Stakeholder priorities are then examined in Section 4, with two methods, both involving elements of the HWBI. The objective was to link stakeholder priorities to HWBI and look for differences in these priorities among communities. Finally, we examined if available ecosystem resources differ either geographically or by community type and provide some recommendations for using all of the information as a part of a national strategy for classifying communities in support of decision making for sustainability.