Measuring and evaluating sustainability: ethics in sustainability indexes

Teaching engineering ethics and sustainability

Most professional engineering code’s of ethics require that engineers shall understand and promote the principles of sustainability and/or sustainable development and have due regard for their environmental, social and economic obligations. However the ethical obligations towards sustainability are incorporated into the teaching of engineering ethics in very few programmes. Typically engineerin...

Measuring Fiscal Sustainability

We propose an index of the fiscal stance that is convenient for practical use. It is based on a finite time horizon, not on an infinite time horizon like most tests. As it employs VAR analysis it is simple to compute and easily automated. We also show how it is possible to analyse a change of policy within a VAR framework. We use this methodology to examine the effect on fiscal sustainability o...

Towards a Coherent Sustainability Ethics

Reflections—Defining and Measuring Sustainability

There is a saying in business schools that ‘‘what gets measured, gets managed.’’ This is bad news for managing our natural capital and the interactions between our economic activity and the environment, which are key to sustainability: these are almost entirely unmeasured and often unmanaged too. None of the usual measures of economic performance—gross domestic product (GDP), unemployment, infl...

Pluralism in Search of Sustainability: Ethics, Knowledge and Methdology in Sustainability Science

Sustainability Science is an emerging, transdisciplinary academic field that aims to help build a sustainable global society by drawing on and integrating research from the humanities and the social, natural, medical and engineering sciences. Academic knowledge is combined with that from relevant actors from outside academia, such as policy-makers, businesses, social organizations and citizens....