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Societal Indicators
Achievement/Results
During this reporting period, IGERT students and faculty were involved in a number of collaborative efforts to nurture and grow the science of sustainability. One exciting result of these collaborative efforts involving current trainees and trainee alumni from Michigan Tech and SUBR was the development of a framework for establishing indicators of social impact that could be incorporated into existing, quantitative, decision-making tools. This work stems from discussion within the Sustainability Colloquium over the last several years where a meta-model for sustainability was established that incorporates relationships for society, the environment, and the economy. The trainees identified the absence of quantitative social indicators as a barrier to decision-making that must be surmounted to fully address sustainability. The indicator framework considers a range of stakeholder groups (i.e., employees, customers, stockholders, community members, supply chain partners, and governmental organizations) and the needs of those groups (i.e., basic, safety/security, affiliation, esteem and self-actualization needs). The students also generated a list of potential indicators that address each combination of stakeholder and need. The indicators are currently being refined further through a Delphi study of sustainability experts in academia, industry, government, and non-governmental organizations.
Address Goals
The primary strategic goal for this reporting period was learning – increase the collaboration among trainees of MTU and SUBR. The secondary strategic goal for this reporting period was discovery – continue to grow the science of sustainability.
More integrative efforts are needed to describe the complex interactions among industrial, environmental, and societal systems. The student interactions as part of the Sustainability Colloquium provided them with the opportunity to compile their knowledge, experiences, and the various modeling approaches they had been exposed to into a single meta-model for sustainability. Sharing their ideas and research in a small group served to foster further collaborations (primary goal) as the students identified synergies among their efforts. Many useful discussions were stimulated during the Sustainability Colloquium, and one of the issues that became clear were weaknesses related to our understanding of the social dimension of sustainability. This appears to be an increasingly important issue, and as a practical matter, many of the students need to address social sustainability as part of their research activities. Once the absence of meaningful social sustainability indicators had been identified, attention shifted toward responding to this knowledge gap. Discussions of a small group of IGERT students and faculty proposed a framework for establishing social sustainability indicators. This proposal was then circulated to the larger IGERT community of scholars for feedback and to solicit improvement ideas. The framework is now in place and a Delphi survey is underway to identify the most important social sustainability indicators.
This activity addressed the secondary goal (growing the science of sustainability) by working to fill a needed gap in the science base. It is improving the ability of businesses to simultaneously consider the three pillars of sustainability (i.e., economic, environmental, and social needs). Businesses are well equipped to predict and track their economic impacts. They have an increasing number of tools and methods to address their environmental impacts. This newly developed framework for social sustainability indicators and a set of proposed indicators allows decision makers to more completely understand the impacts of their choices on sustainability.
