Monitoring for
	Sustainability

The Quest for Sustainability

The term sustainability expresses the human desire for an environment that can provide for our needs now and for future generations. Our collective journey to find a way to live harmoniously with each other and within our social, economic, and ecological environments is a quest for sustainability (Figure 1).

Sustainability is a compelling societal goal with widespread public appeal. However, what the term implicitly conveys and what it explicitly means are not necessarily the same. Finding a specific definition of sustainability that is broadly acceptable is difficult because it is about values that vary among groups and over time.

The quest ultimately requires decisions about what to sustain, for whom, for how long, at what cost, and how. Clearly, this is not a simple task because issues of generational equity are involved (i.e., balancing the distribution of benefits and costs within this generation and across future generations).

Despite ongoing scientific and political debate regarding specific definitions of sustainability, the term has proven to be a useful organizing concept for exploring the relationship between social, economic, and ecological systems, their current conditions, and trends (Floyd et al. 2001). Although people may not easily define sustainability, they more readily recognize its antithesis.

Over the past several decades, the quest for sustainability has emerged as a central theme of economic development, social policy, and natural resource management at local, regional, national, and international levels. Scientists, resource managers, policymakers, and citizens alike increasingly recognize the interconnectedness, complexity, and dynamism of social, economic, and ecological systems. However, the very complexity of these systems poses significant challenges to our ability to

study and understand them. Our ever-expanding technological capabilities along with our unique ability to exploit dense energy sources, such as fossil and nuclear fuels, and our species’ widespread population dispersal means that humans are now the dominant keystone species worldwide. Our technological ability to manipulate the biophysical environment now extends from the molecular scale of genetic engineering to local and regional scales of urbanization and land use patterns visible from satellites to the global atmospheric scale of climate. This ability has caused increasing concern for the current and future consequences of our actions. We are beginning to recognize and confront the undesirable outcomes of past human activities that may be redressed only with significant effort and cost, if at all.

Sustainability is a human value, not a fixed, independent state of social, economic, and ecological affairs. It requires human judgment about the condition or state of a set of tangibles. Inherent in sustainability is our positive valuation of tangibles that we wish to persist in time and space.

Sustainability is not absolute because it is dependent on social values and involves multiple dimensions and scales, including those of time and space. As we become more aware of cross-scale interactions, decision makers increasingly seek a triple bottom line from which tradeoffs can be more clearly defined and simultaneous social, economic, and ecological benefits can be achieved and maintained over time. Given the range of human values and differing objectives for future social, economic, and ecological conditions, engaging in a public discourse about sustainability is critical.

Perspectives on Sustainability

The academic and popular literature is filled with discussions about sustainability, and this body of literature reveals diverse opinions about what sustainability is and is not. Exploring the range of perspectives and their common themes is essential for understanding the context of monitoring sustainability. This section presents summaries of some of the many perspectives (readers wishing a more complete treatment of the subject are referred to many of the specific texts devoted to the subject including Floyd 2002; Floyd et al 2001; Aplet 1993).

Although the term sustainability has been around for longer, the most common conception of it, sustainable development, was popularized through the 1987 publication of Our Common Future, the report of the Bruntland Commission (WCED 1987). The Bruntland Commission defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987).

Despite broad use, this definition has been criticized as “so vague as to be consistent with almost any form of action or inaction” (Pearce and Atkinson 1993) [UFS1] )3and essentially totemic in nature. In fact this and other definitions of sustainable development have engaged many people in circular debates that conclude the idea is so vague and controversial that the term should be abandoned. Others however, conclude that it is indeed a value-laden concept but that guidance can be taken from these types of general definitions.

Writing for the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Colfer et al. (1995) modified the Bruntland definition to more specifically address forests: “Sustainable forest management aims to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Two conditions indicate sustainability for this definition: (1) ecosystem integrity is ensured/maintained; (2) well-being of people is maintained or enhanced.”

Prabhu and his colleagues (1999) incorporated these indicators by defining sustainable forestry as “a set of objectives, activities, and outcomes consistent with maintaining or improving the forest’s ecological integrity and contributing to people’s well-being now and in the future.”

Sustaining Outputs or Contexts

Some people feel that the Bruntland and similar definitions focus too much on the material aspects of well-being: the production of goods that are often equated with human needs. Alternatively, these critics reason, a useful definition should focus on the sustainability of the systems that support production. Tainter (2001) and Allen et al. (in press) propose that sustainability entails “maintaining, or fostering the development of the systemic contexts that produce the goods, services and amenities that people need or value, at an acceptable cost, for as long as they are needed or valued.”

Sustainability as a State or a Process

In pure systems theory, a system is either sustainable or it is not (Allen and Hoekstra 1994). If some component or function within the system is undermined without intervention, the system will collapse. In the purist sense, then, sustainability is a state; and expressions such as almost sustainable or the degree of sustainability are false. Most people recognize, however, that defining absolute sustainability (e.g., knowing all the components and interactions and the critical thresholds for each) is illusory, arrogant, unachievable, or some combination of these.

Many people view sustainability as that ideal goal or state towards which we strive (Brown and Peterson 1994); and consequently, the idea of sustainability as a process has become commonplace. The Bruntland Commission report, for example, stated that “sustainable development is not a fixed state of harmony, but rather a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are made consistent with future as well as present needs” (WCED, 1987). What many refer to as the “sustainability process” summarizes a set of behaviors or actions that they believe will help them achieve a state of sustainability, whether they mean it as an absolute state or as a range of conditions.

Sustainability or Sustained Yield?

The terms sustainability and sustained yield share both a core word and a core idea, but they are not the same. Any meaningful discussion of this subject must unequivocally distinguish them. Legislated mandates, particularly the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act (1960), have defined and periodically redefined sustained yield. Originally, it meant “the amount of wood that a forest can continually produce at a given intensity of management” (Helms 1998). This narrow meaning has been expanded through time to include more than just timber, but the expanded meaning still emphasizes the supply of resources and commodities as discrete elements in space and time.

As Holling et al. note (1998), the time horizon may be expressed ecologically as “in perpetuity”; but commerce actually governs the time horizon when living resources reproduce slowly (and therefore replenish slowly) or when long-term ecological values are discounted so greatly that no legitimate value exists. Under this scenario it is best to deplete the resource quickly and reinvest money. The result is sequential exploitation of stocks.

Sustained yield is focused on quantities of resource outputs from a land system. These quantities of resources are considered individually and at times efforts are made to “integrate” the resource outputs in bundles. The individual resource outputs are generally accrued from multiple time and space scales. The difficulty of interpreting how land management activities generated the sustained yield of more than one resource output at a time has created very large linear optimization models. The fundamental problem with the sustained yield perspective is that it fails to recognize that management activities influence joint-production land systems that constantly provide soil, water, air, plant and animal material, portions of which humans use as resources. The focus of sustainability should be on the joint production system. Investment in targeted management activities can alter (increase or decrease) the resource outputs of a joint-production land system. Focus on the joint-production land system and there is no need for post anti-integration as land systems are by definition integrated joint production entities.

Ecological Perspectives on Sustainability

Some people have defined sustainability from a purely ecological perspective, stating that sustainability is more akin to the concepts of ecological or biological integrity. In this context, the human role in the natural system is encapsulated by vague and relatively meaningless statements to the effect “humans are part of ecosystems.” In certain contexts this implicitly attempts to legitimize anything that anyone wants to do with natural resources without regard to consequences. And yet, humans are living creatures that do connect with natural systems. Finding a fit for the nonbiological aspects of human systems (e.g., societies and economies) within this perspective is challenging.

A perspective of ecological empiricism states that of the components of sustainability (for example ecological, economic, and social), the ecological dimension is paramount. Treating socioeconomic systems as stressors and intrusions on the natural world, as if human systems were completely unnatural, is often the outcome. This perspective can be misleading since there are important multidirectional feedbacks between socioeconomic systems and ecological systems. Perceiving the interrelationships as unidirectional can be problematic.

The preeminence of the ecological dimension can be interpreted more moderately by simply recognizing that human systems are fundamentally based on the biological limits and hence, sustainability, of the ecological system. Some people, however, find that the idea of ecological dominance results in an uncertain role for humans within the environment.

The idea of a minimum-versus-maximum approach to sustainability provides another ecological perspective. Jacobs (1991) states that “sustainability means that the environment should be protected in such a condition and to such a degree that environmental capacities (the ability of the environment to perform its various functions) are maintained over time: at least at scales sufficient to avoid future catastrophe and at most at scales which give future generations the opportunity to enjoy an equal measure of environmental consumption.” Hardoy et al. (1992) and others state that this maximal sustainability perspective may also require improvements or restoration in environmental quality if the current environment is already degraded.

Socioeconomic Perspectives on Sustainability

Economic definitions and discussions of sustainability raise a variety of different points that have contributed to the sustainability dialogue. Central to these is the focus on maintaining natural capital. Natural capital refers to the stock of ecological resources including water, soil, vegetation, and wildlife, plus, in the broadest definitions, the capacity of the environment to assimilate pollutants. The means of achieving sustainability is to maintain the stock of natural capital and to live off the “interest,” or productive excess, and ideally to invest enough to increase the available surplus.

If the focus of sustainability is on maintaining natural capital, then nonrenewable resources present a challenge. From one perspective, there is no sustainable harvest rate of nonrenewable resources; and therefore, they must be preserved. Discussions about sustaining nonrenewable resources are really just attempts to co-opt a concept to make harvesting them more acceptable. More legitimately, nonrenewable resources can be consumed if there is some acceptable form of substitution or if future generations are compensated in some way.

The broader issue of substitution of capital is also central to economic discussions of sustainability. Some economists view all capital (natural, human, built) as substitutable and suggest that the most efficient thing to do and therefore the wisest (from this perspective efficiency is central) is to convert inefficient natural capital and substitute it with much more efficient forms of capital (e.g., built capital).

Some participants in the sustainability dialogue have contrasted many of these ideas and differing perspectives about capital and substitutability in a discussion of what is frequently termed “weak” versus “strong” sustainability (see, for example, Pearce and Atkinson 1993). Weak sustainability advocates maintaining as much of the status quo as possible and stresses current generations. This perspective emphasizes “nondeclining utility, nondeclining consumption, and the nondeclining value of total investments in the manufactured, human, and natural capital stocks” (Toman et al. 1998). Strong sustainability emphasizes intergenerational needs and places value in the changes in certain critical stocks of natural capital based on the assumption that there are certain types and levels of irreplaceable capital. Strong sustainability establishes these criteria a priori and uses a range of policy mechanisms (e.g., emission limits or emission trading credits) to seek “the most effective and least costly ways to achieve the goals” (Toman et al. 1998).

The discussion of welfare and intra- and intergenerational equity is also a critical contribution from socioeconomic perspectives. Consistent with the notion of maintaining natural capital, intergenerational equity “requires that each generation manage its resources in ways to ensure that future generations can meet their demands for goods and services, at economic and environmental costs consistent with maintaining or even increasing per capita welfare through time” (Loucks 1997). The concepts of fairness and equity in the distribution of costs and benefits of sustainability, although often difficult to measure, are seminal contributions to the sustainability dialogue.

Interpretations of social sustainability are often quite broad but include as essential components such things as meeting basic human needs, personal growth and development, maintaining physical and mental health, equity, community resilience, and involvement in decision making (Richardson 1994; BC Round Table 1993).

In contrast, Tainter (2001) posits that “[c]onceptualizing sustainability in terms of human well-being potentially opens Pandora’s box.” Such concepts, Tainter writes may be desirable goals of human society but “may appear to some observers to have little to do with sustainability” (2001). He suggests that the challenges are twofold and require first to identify social goals related to sustainability and those that are unrelated and second to conduct an assessment (e.g., historical analysis) to show that a particular aspect of well-being has been missing in societies that are unsustainable. In this context he concludes for example that the health of people in forest-dependent communities, while laudable, is not a goal of sustainability. These ideas while raising the difficulties of identifying the critical aspects of social sustainability in forested environments contrast sharply with other writing on sustainability and social well-being (see for example Colfer et al. 1999 and Colfer et al. 2001) and those espoused nationally and internationally in communities forums on sustainability.

Another perspective of social sustainability (Hardoy et al. 1992) focuses on perpetuating existing institutions and customary behaviors and relations in their current state. However, others believe this conception of sustainability may conflict with ecological sustainability and may require some fundamental changes to institutions, traditional uses, and current social values (e.g., kinds of employment) in order to be compatible.

The issue of “who counts” is germane to many social perspectives on sustainability and in certain aspects the issue is pivotal. Colfer et al. (1999) argue for the importance of local people in involvement, decision-making, and sustainable management. The debate about balancing local with national interests, particularly in the case of public lands, is a discussion about power and is in many situations the central theme in sustainability.

Defining Sustainability Through an Interdisciplinary Process

Many specialists are working on developing and understanding the sustainability concept, but everyone has a point of view about what sustainability is. Disciplinary conceptions of the term, though useful, will by nature be incomplete because people will define sustainability with discipline-specific vocabulary (Allen et al. 1994). Sustainability “calls for broader disciplinary integration and subtler conceptualization than are offered by current efforts” (Allen et al. 1994). Creating a process for dialogue and the development of a shared vocabulary are critical to moving sustainability from semantic debate to application.

Sustainability Monitoring

If our goal is sustainability, how well are we doing? Monitoring has emerged as one of the primary management responses to the sustainability challenge and it helps us understand the condition of systems and what we value as sustainable. Monitoring has focused on developing the tools necessary to gauge where we are relative to where we want to be. In other words, how well are we doing?

Monitoring is the “repeated observation, through time, of selected objects and values in the ecosystem to determine the state of the system” (Clayoquot Sound Scientific Panel 1995). In the context of sustainability, a monitoring program establishes a set of markers that help assess whether systems are being managed in a sustainable fashion. Specifically, monitoring may be useful to:

Ø Build a base of understanding about the system by revealing patterns and trends;

Ø Establish benchmarks of the current state of the system for comparison to desired future conditions;

Ø Detect change in the system and serve as an early warning of change;

Ø Evaluate the effectiveness of programs and measure progress towards goals;

Ø Identify changes in baseline conditions for key indicators that result from management actions, including restoration activities;

Ø Support planning and management decisions through the identification of key issues and trends;

Ø Communicate about the state of the environment; and

Ø Serve as an accountability mechanism for the public, managers, governments, and international communities.

Monitoring and the Adaptive Management Cycle

In adaptive management managers systematically and rigorously learn from specific actions so that they can accommodate change. It is not simply hindsight but a conscious treatment of management as a set of experimental actions that through monitoring can be adjusted to improve the results of management (Figure 2).

Consequently, monitoring is not independent from the larger management process. “Good management requires good information,” and a monitoring program can provide this when it is “structured into the process of management, well designed and executed” (Landres 1995). Monitoring becomes the core, the essential feedback loop, of managing for sustainability.

Follow these links to:

Ø Reference Value Fact Sheet

Ø Monitoring Frameworks Fact Sheet

Ø Scale and Monitoring Fact Sheet

Ø Sustainability Monitoring References

Ø The USDA Forest Service LUCID Project

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