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Development and application of a community sustainability visualization tool through integration of US EPA’s Sustainable and Health Community Research Program tasks
Citation:
Russell, M., L. Smith, AND R. Fulford. Development and application of a community sustainability visualization tool through integration of US EPA’s Sustainable and Health Community Research Program tasks. Presented at A Community on Ecosystem Services (ACES) and Ecosystem Markets 2012, December 10 - 14, 2012.
Impact/Purpose:
This is an abstract for submission to ACES 2012 to present our research.
Description:
Maintaining a harmonious balance between economic, social, and environmental well-being is paramount to community sustainability. Communities need a practical/usable suite of measures to assess their current position on a "surface" of sustainability created from the interaction of these three pillars of human well-being. By developing “practical measures” of the relative levels of each of these three pillars we will enable communities at national, regional, state, and possibly neighborhood scales to assess their current location on this sustainability triumvirate, where their community has been in the past, and estimate future directions either towards a more or less sustainable state given upcoming decisions. Thus, "practical measures” of community sustainability are those that are easily interpreted and readily available to any community, and can be integrated into a three-domain system for assessing communities past, present, and future sustainability.