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Sustainability Indicators for Small and Rural Communities: Development of DISC (Decision Integration for Stronger Communities).
Citation:
Summers, J., D. Olszyk, Maria Salazar, L. Harwell, AND A. Brookes. Sustainability Indicators for Small and Rural Communities: Development of DISC (Decision Integration for Stronger Communities). Community Indicators Summit, Denver, Colorado, October 10 - 11, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
DISC provides a application where small communities can access sustainability data and assess their sustainability goals. This application will promote smart growth and minimize adverse impacts of sustainability improvements by examining the efforts holistically. Such an application does not presently exist for small and rural communities.
Description:
DISC is an application of existing indicators that offers relevant, local and readily-available information to assist smaller communities to address their sustainabillity goals. Small towns and rural communities are looking for ways to strengthen their economies, provide better quality of life, and build on local assets. They are creating their own paths to sustainability that enhance their distinctive characters and that fit their size, geography, and resources. In a series of discussions with smaller communities (<50,000), community leaders have said they want a simple, streamlined and easy “dashboard” or a compact set of tools that can help them assess their sustainability profile. They want to use that “dashboard” to identify and facilitate targeted improvement projects. To address this need, EPA’s Sustainability Snapshot Project is taking an iterative, agile development approach to tailor existing indicators to the unique needs of small communities. The emerging “dashboard” is called “Decision Integration for Strong Communities” or DISC and is designed to encourage smart growth and offer relevant, local, and readily-available information. To ensure DISC is useful to a variety of smaller and rural communities, EPA project staff reached out to small numbers of interested communities and potential users at different steps of the development process. All of the scientific content available through DISC has been curated from existing environmental indicators for various topics such as the built environment, community involvement, education, natural resource management, equity, hazard vulnerability, housing, local economy, public health, resilience planning, society and transportation. Generally, the community characteristics dashboard is a user-friendly graphic interface display that presents information in an accessible, easily understood format. Communities are provided with information on attributes of their sustainability, and most importantly, information on resources they can potentially target to implement projects to improve the community’s resilience and long-term success. The indicators used within the application can be weighted based on a community’s values, allowing the user to customize their snapshot to reflect their community’s unique priorities and constraints. In late 2019, DISC will be offered as an executable, downloadable file to communities interested in its use
