Community indices, such as maturity or diversity, condense information regarding the structure and composition of communities into a single metric. Soil health and quality can be inferred from such indices by assuming that communities with different structure and composition function differently. Thus, these indices can be instrumental in monitoring soil and sediment quality as well as assessin...

This article develops a Sustainability Informatics Framework, a framework that connects Information Technology with sustainability and is based on the Belief-Action-Outcome and Energy Informatics frameworks. The triple-bottom line (People, Planet, and Profit) is adopted as a criterion for measuring sustainability and three sustainability indices are first formulated and then visualized using Su...

This paper deconstructs the relationship between the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) and national income. The ESI attempts to provide a single figure which encapsulates ‘environmental sustainability’ for each country included in the analysis, and this allied with a ‘league table’ format so as to name and shame bad performers, has resulted in widespread reporting within the popular pres...

The concepts of sustainable original harvest (SOH) and sustainable disturbance harvest (SDH), and simple indices such as the ratio of successive harvests do not provide a reliable indication of the sustainability of a harvest. Some limitations of these concepts are illustrated in the context of selection harvesting of timber from natural forests. Four models are used to demonstrate that maintai...

Considering water resource scarcity and uncertainty in climate and demand futures, decision-makers require techniques for sustainability analysis in resource management. Through unclear definitions of “sustainability”, however, traditional indices for resource evaluation propose options of limited flexibility by adopting static climate and demand scenarios, limiting analysis variables to a part...

abstract reduced inequality in utilization of community resources and facilities is one of the essential standards of sustainable development. in this regard, regional and local inequalities are of special importance. this paper emphasizes district differences in meybod city level in addition to specifying the position of meybod city among our country. it was done using a descriptive-analytic m...

The study investigates whether the present pattern of urban development in India in the creation of mega cities is sustainable and what it can learn from the global megacities. This has been done by comparing the two Indian cities Mumbai and Bangalore with selected mega cities of the worlds representing different stages of development (Shanghai, London, and Singapore) using an indicator-based a...

The growing interest in the use of indices is closely connected to the increasing complexity of policy problems and the amount of available data. In the water sector, beyond their face value, indices can provide various types of information: description, communication, assessment, showing trends and predicting the future. Because the Arab world is the most water-scarce part of the world, most o...

recent debates concerning sustainable agriculture have received many attentions, but efforts concerning materialization of the concept haven’t enough. if the concept of sustainability is to be used as an underlying component of human interventions in the environment and ecosystem, a sound measure of sustainability is surely required. development of agricultural sector without considering the co...