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Decision Integration for Strong Communities - Developing an Indicator Application Through Community Engagement
Citation:
Harwell, L., V. Salazar, D. Olszyk, A. Brookes, B. Duncan, M. Mccullough, L. Smith, K. Wolfe, AND Kevin Summers. Decision Integration for Strong Communities - Developing an Indicator Application Through Community Engagement. To be Presented at 11th annual Conference onm Growing Sustainable Communities, Dubuque, Iowa, October 02 - 03, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Exposure of the DISC software and approach to community leaders to determine utility for their decision-making processes
Description:
Communities want to be more sustainable and maintain public health, community vitality and ecosystem services. Smaller communities, however, often lack the resources to accomplish this goal. While there is an array of existing sustainability assessment and management (SAM) tools such as the STAR rating system, the Living Building and Community Challenge and the International Eco-city Framework, they usually require extensive expertise, time and research to use them. In a series of discussions with smaller communities (populations < 50,000), stakeholders have stated that they want a simpler, more streamlined and easy to understand set of compact tools or a dashboard that helps them conduct an initial assessment of their sustainability profile. After the profile, they want targeted, relevant information on other tools, indicators or actions. DISC (Decision Integration for Strong Communities) is a software tool that provides users with access to US EPA tools and potential websites to access information relating to information that could be helpful in community decision making. The presentation will discuss the project, its results thus far, and demonstrate the soon-to-be available software tool. Audiences will take away information regarding access to tool and its utility for data retrieval and use. DISC is a suite of simple to complex tools that used together provide a systems approach to help them optimize actions that are based on a full accounting of the costs, benefits, tradeoffs, and synergies among social (including public health), economic, and environmental outcomes of alternative decisions. For the DISC project, stakeholders include city or tribal officials or staff, community leaders, nongovernmental organizations (NGO’s), representatives of federal, tribal, state, and regional government agencies or partnerships.