Environmental space and the prism of sustainability: frameworks for indicators measuring sustainable development

Abstract The notion of Environmental Space refers to external criteria regarding resources available for human consumption. On the one hand, it has been demonstrated that the reduction of energy consumption, material flows and land use would significantly contribute to reducing the main stresses for the European environment. On the other hand, the concept defines a socially motivated minimum of resource availability, permitting to lead a dignified life in the respective society. Environmental space is a tool for exploring sustainable development benchmarks on a sound scientific basis, and it is helpful to derive indicators of sustainable development for different applications on the macro as well as on the micro level. However, the environmental space concept expresses no preference regarding the structure of the economic system, as long as the environmental and social benchmarks are respected, nor does it suggest specific economic sustainability indicators. Since in 1995, the CSD formally introduced the institutional dimension as the fourth dimension of sustainable development, sustainable development can be described by referring to four dimensions and their six interlinkages. Using the Prism of Sustainability , the concept—although rather complex—can easily be communicated and used as a tool for gathering public support for sustainability policies. The prism simplifies matters by structuring them, but avoids the oversimplification inherent to aggregate indices. At the macro level, the environmental space and the prism of sustainability have been applied to international, regional and national indicator development. At the micro level, systems of indicators for households, companies and local communities have been developed. The indicators have also been used in dynamic modeling, demonstrating their capability to assess the sustainability of different policy strategies.