Tools to Consider in Sustainability Practice
(Section Summary)

Many communities, and other kinds of organizations, lack the know-how to assess the costs and benefits of economic development opportunities, especially as they relate to environmental and societal issues, or to make well-informed decisions about development options that may be available. The question is – how to move forward? – when there is apparently a gap in awareness about what sustainable development represents, an urgency of addressing it, and the fact that existing instruments are not being used to their full potential. There are a number of “tools” that can be used to assist practitioners and benefactors in their progress toward sustainability that will support the application of citizen science and adaptive management processes. These tools, in and of themselves, or applied in tandem, can offer guidance and understanding toward the ambitions of sustainable development. These tools include the following.

1. The Natural Step (TNS) is an organizational learning tool and systems approach to practicing sustainable development which incorporates many of the recognized sustainability principles.
2. Triple Bottom Line: For an organization (or a community) to be sustainable (a long run perspective) it must be financially secure (as evidenced through such measures as profitability); it must minimize (or ideally eliminate) its negative environmental impacts; and, it must act in conformity with societal expectations.
3. Balanced Scorecard: to help managers and employees throughout the institution empower themselves and fully understand the institutional goals to help them contribute toward the sustainability objectives of the institution.
4. Sustainability Competency & Opportunity Rating & Evaluation (SCORE): represents a powerful tool to assess your sustainable business practices and to plan future actions.
5. The U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA): as a statute with its implementing regulations NEPA has required U.S. agencies to acknowledge that there are environmental consequences of their actions and to account for those in reporting mechanisms.
6. Environmental Management Systems (EMS): part of the organization's overall management system for developing, implementing, achieving, reviewing, and maintaining an organization's environmental policy.
7. Environmentally Sustainable Management Systems (ESMS): Through a combination of ideas and tools, a new methodology is suggested, an Environmentally Sustainable Management System (ESMS), designed after the ideas of the EMS.
8. The Ecological Footprint: compares the environmental impact of specific actions to the limitations of the Earth's natural resources and ecosystem functionality (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996).
9. Sustainable Emissions and Resource Usage is a four-step process that can support the Ecological Footprint concept for determining a sustainable rate of resource use and waste production.
10. The Use of Indicators: Many of the tools highlighted above can benefit from a means of measuring progress and/or improvements. After a consensus is developed regarding criteria that describe the future viability of healthy resources for example, indicators to measure sustainability can be defined (Flint, 2004) that point the way and mark progress toward a vision of sustainability.
11. Geographic Information Systems: A Geographic Information System, or GIS, is a computer-based approach to collecting, storing, and analyzing data that have spatial characteristics and can provide periodic instances of graphic landscape-grounded versions of current and future conditions.
12. Conservation-Based Development: is the practice of integrating environmental and social issues into the meeting of economically viable mixed-use development of both urban and rural landscapes (Arendt, 1996).
13. Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED): is an evaluation tool involved in building construction that assesses environmental performance from a “whole building” perspective over the life cycle of the building.
14. Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) is a “systems approach” investigation which aims to quantify the level of energy and raw materials used, the solid, liquid, and gaseous wastes produced, and consider the socio-economic issues around pathways of resource flow at every stage of a project or a product's life or process.
15. Industrial Ecology: uses the metaphor of metabolism to analyze production and consumption by industry, government, organizations and consumers, and the interactions between them.

We will achieve sustainability when we understand the economic, social, and environmental consequences of our actions and make deliberate choices that allow all people to lead healthy, productive, and enjoyable lives, now and in the future, without experiencing unintended consequences. These tools can assist our understanding and guide our actions. .......... read more!

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