Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to encourage integrated policy initiatives suitable for the urban management of
specific factors, such as energy, transport, waste, employment, access, governance,
population/housing density and land use. A sustainability assessment requires any
new development to produce a 'net benefit' in the three areas of environment, social
and economic performance, with no trade-offs between any, by promoting positive
outcomes from development. Ravetz (2000), working on similar and related concerns,
has developed an integrated sustainability appraisal process in his work on the Greater
Manchester city region. His discussion of complexity, systems, flows, stocks, limits,
dynamics and externalities complements the work of Rees and Wackernagel by high-
lighting the practical/programme, planning and policy dimensions of city governance.
The problems Ravetz confronts are essentially the complex interdependencies of
ecosystems, the intangible qualities of environmental capital, the tangibility of material
resources, and the dynamic evolutionary nature of physical and human systems over
time. Ravetz also explores the possibilities of integrating the social and the economic
(although not the political) into the development of sustainability indicators and the
evaluation of their likely future directions. He recognizes that virtually any approach
to sustainability appraisal, integrated or not, of corporations or urban municipalities
will be value-laden, and will require linking up different forms of professional
expertise, knowledge and opinion. So, given this, the application of a systems per-
spective is valuable in putting together multiple factors from environmental, economic
and social dimensions:
For integration of environmental and socio-economic assessments in an IA
[integrated assessment] framework, there is an important distinction between
weak and strong approaches. Weak integration leaves different sets of impacts
to be balanced by stakeholders and decision-makers, or in effect integrated
through a political process. Strong integration aims to carry out the integration
within the technical process, whether multi-criteria or economic, and thus requires
comprehensive frameworks, which are more vulnerable to indeterminacy and
multiplicity. Integration via community impact evaluation relies on the expert
definition of costs and benefits for different stakeholders, which again has difficulty
with cumulative effects, multiple values and contested boundaries. Integration
via the criteria of futurity and equity also struggles to define these in practical
terms where different actors have multiple perspectives and the line between
costs and benefits is often fuzzy.
(Ravetz, 2000: 57)
In practice, Ravetz continues, indeterminacy and multiplicity mean that any sustain-
ability appraisal is never a final and true answer - it is always work in progress -
but it is more likely to be viable if holistic system principles guide the methods and
context of investigation.
Sustainability indicators can also be translated into an array of league tables seeking
to compare the performance of one business or city with another, and in the process
to motivate changes and improvements. League tables are notorious for their over-
simplification of highly complex issues, but they often produce a picture that
demonstrates the effectiveness or otherwise of policy and action. However, there is
always a difference, it seems, between rhetoric or appearance and reality, as even
though league tables may be based on sound and generally accepted criteria, they
