Global self-sustainability index

What is it about?

The ‘Davos dilemma’ posits a sustainability crisis, provoked by rising human population and intense competitive behaviours, in terms of control and access to depleting natural resources.More broadly understood as an ecological problem, rather than just socio-economic behavioural deficiencies, the call is for better integrated social, natural and business-indexed reporting within planetary boundaries. This poses challenges for nationally governed societies to equitably account for self-sustainability performance, in enabling their successive government agendas to re-orientate policies and industry investments as innovation towards achieving this in the longer term. We propose and test a global self-sustainability index for countries across four metrics: economic, environmental, social and innovation. Our tentative findings from a cross-country analysis of 27 countries during 2007–2010 illustrate the approach for wider systematic analysis and as a basis for future largescale assessments on self-sustainability within and between countries.

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Why is it important?

This paper unique in proposing a Sustainability index that is not based on GDP composites. The conception of the index considers several existing measures and indices and propose a combination of social, environmental, economic and innovation measures. The development of Sustainability index takes the continuity (social, economic, environment), normative and innovations dimensions for achieving sustainability over time for the society, country and global level

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