How Social Sustainability Is Defined and Measured - Essay Example

Introduction With a view of creating high quality life every has adopted principles for environmental, economic and social sustainability as a basis for state operations and actions. Basically social sustainability for a community is that creating and maintaining quality of life for people. Since the emergence of widespread concerns and over environmental degradation, a great deal of work has been put into the concept of environmental sustainability. In this research work the discussion is on how social sustainability is defined and measured, what policies are made? And how institutions are implementing and promoting these policies in order to achieve social sustainability. This also work emphasizes on the importance of the interrelationship between the environmental, social and economic aspects of social sustainability and includes the tools that measure sustainable development. There are many tools used to measure sustainable development but we have focused on the few working in UK and EU, how they measure sustainable development, which tool is more successful and what steps should be included to enhance its results and productivity. Whether it is helpful in transmitting social sustainability awareness into society and developing equity between generations (meaning the future generations will not be effected or disadvantaged by current generation activities). Basically the success of sustainable development tools and strategies depends upon the ability to achieve the highest attainable increase in living standards measured against least possible environmental degradation. Thus, the discussion in this paper is based on social development and tools to measure their sustainability and their success rate in providing environmental protection and also protection to future generation resources. Discussion Sustainable development is something that meets the needs of the present generation, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. According to some researchers, we are using future generation resources to meet todays environmental built. That is the reason there is a connection between social responsibility and sustainable development. Social responsibility is that we take environmental friendly steps in environment building, do not use non-ethical investment which has more than in-hand (available) resource requirement and build a sustainable product. It basically introduces the idea of ethical corporate practices and good citizenship, and is usually associated with organization’s best practices and investment plans and healthy environment built (Kimmet, 2009). Hence we can say that there is a slight difference between social responsibility and sustainable development and after the latest predictions about climate change, small as well as large businesses, have gathered pace to adopt the sustainability tools with in the built environment. The importance of sustainable development has become debatable after leading economists have stated the fact that contemporary business ways with respect to greenhouse gas emissions would lead to global economic and environmental disaster in the long run, and now days many of the scientists, professionals and government officials accept the fact that action should be taken to lessen the climate change through emissions of greenhouse gas and adoption of sustainability practices in general. For this reason environmental impact assessment tools have been introduced and their function is to predict and identify the effect of building projects on the environment. In professional practice, many of these tools can be used with regards to the use and handling of rural and natural resources, as well as throughout the whole lifecycle of buildings from inception and design, construction, and development through to the operation phase and post occupancy-monitoring. Many of these tools measuring sustainability of the built environment and have been developed to determine if any capability exists for further development, or whether a development is sustainable, or growth is being made towards sustainable development. Indicators are also an important part of the range of the tools available and relate mainly to the parameters that can be measured to show trends or sudden changes in a particular condition. It is important to distinguish between those tools used for measurement (identifying variables measuring sustainable development and collecting relevant data), and those used for assessment (against performance against criteria), as well as those tools that can be used to effect a move towards sustainable development by changing practice and procedures (Hertin, 2004). Usually these tools measure impacts in three areas, in economic impacts; effects of cost, quality and availability of goods, change in level of investment, prices, and output are measured. In social impacts; influence on health, safety at work, accidents in the community, the effect on quality of life, educational and other skills are measured. In environmental impacts it looks around the change in emission of greenhouse gases and their effect on the environment, the usage of natural, un-natural and non-renewable resources, efficient or abstract usage of water, change in the production of waste products, change in atmosphere and whether people get affected by it or not and will it affect wildlife or not? Well systematically we can say that these tools cover all the areas that can be affected, but in actual practice it only looks at a very small area of mentioned impacts. All of the tools focus on a comprehensive process and well designed approach, but most of them are not fully practiced and overlook the un-intended impacts. If we take the example of construction of a building, it will be noticed that lack of resources and technical expertise are not only overlooked but also the area it covers, central heating and cooling system used in it, can cause an increase in CO2 production in the environment. For this reason buildings are considered to be the major contributing tool of CO2 in the atmosphere which is the main cause of ozone depletion and incrimination of global warming, which is effecting the environment directly (Reed et al. 2009). These tools are also overlooked by professionals or desk officers as they are in form of guides and over complex for desk officers to understand and that is why they usually don’t bother practicing these rules fully. UK government specifically has taken the tools under consideration and elaborated the usefulness of tools in terms of simplicity, as tools should be flexible that the professionals and officers can easily decide what sort of impacts they should consider and what impacts they should avoid. Guidance included in tools should be precise and properly written; there should be explanatory text, contacts and links for each, social, economical and environmental impact and more useful links referring specific issues and expertise (Reed et al 2009). Two types of approaches have been used to measure the results of sustainability, Qualitative and Quantitative approach. A quantitative approach is used to know the results of different options to get valuable information for assessment. It is used when the process is dealing with complicated issues such as risk analysis, cost effectiveness, cost benefits, multi criteria. On the other hand qualitative are participatory methods like dialogue methods, policy exercises, mutual learning method and Delphi methods. Many of these tools are useful and have several benefits in assessment but there are many shortcomings as well, for example, according to Reed et al (2009) if the assessment of any project was required due to any damage or loss, it was as expensive as building a new project due to high demands of designers and complicated energy modeling. It showed that even assessment process was not fine and crippled by the diplomacy of designers and owners. Thus, we can say that the project was not sustainable. Also building criteria and rules/regulations vary from country to country and region to region. Comparing different tools LEED system has lower standards than BREEAM U.K and furthermore Australian Green Star systems have low standards than BREEAM hence we can say that U.S has low standards for building than U.K. US is already lagging behind from both EU and Asia pacific region in terms of corporate social responsibility and sustainability development. Research says that only 48 of whole US firms produce and submit annual sustainability reports according to Global Reporting Initiative guidelines. Wall-mart who has more column inches than any other organization in US has never produced or published any report (Moore, Wen, 2008). To make the tools or systems practicable there should be some benchmark set globally for building tools and characteristics according to climate, economy, society and other issues should not be neglected. In terms of construction all the buildings should be given the same considerations, as in some cases only high profile buildings are taken into consideration for sustainability. Considering these tools we cannot achieve the goal of developing social sustainability in community, hence actions should be taken to reduce the disadvantages for the target group. According to Zairi (2000) social sustainability plan should include following points: Health & Safety (indicators of occupational health and safety Environmental performance Social capital Human capital Non Product output to air Sustainable livelihood Non Product output to water Basic needs such as housing, salaries must be according to the requirement For environmental sustainability we should consider the following points: Sustainable use of natural resources Protection of the biosphere Reduction and disposal of wastes Energy conservation Risk Reduction Safe Products & Services Environmental restoration From above mentioned methods social sustainability tool’s features are good but not good enough and can be enhanced further. Even the best considered tools now days lack some technicalities in them, for example BREEAM are one of the best tools used in the UK but the major gap is that it is not linked to any 2D or 3D software. The data entry producer is manual and complicated and can only be done by professional analyzers. There should be some approach of sustainability tools and environmental impact assessment should have a digital program with a clear menu and accessible database and OOP components for ease of use and reduction of time. Further this software can measure and develop a defined conceptual framework for each and every project to implement Virtual Reality along with life cycle approach, so that a prototype of each project can be developed easily. Conclusion Sustainable development is a global challenge. A major problem in sustainable development seen in the studies is the gap between the theory and practical implementation of system or tools. It has been noticed that technological progress and environmental improvements must be sufficient in order to attain a strong sustainable development. For this reason, we should consider the embedding of technology into pre-existing tools to make them adaptable. All of the tools and systems which are defined to measure sustainability should be reconsidered and enhanced according to requirement and adaptability of desk officers and other users. We can see that there are no holistic tools developed so far and integration of OOP, 2D and 3D technology can make them work for longer period, and it can narrow down the gap between the desk officers and complicated inaccessible analysis reports (which can only be read or understood by professionals). CO2 emission with respect to sustainability has become a global issue and UK has set its goal to reduce it to 60% till 2050. There should be some tools which focus on renewable energy, material cost, waste management, thermal efficiency, human gain, use of solar energy and consider Life cycle analysis of project. Also designer and developer should consider the long term benefit society and community can get from this approach (Crosbie et al, 2009). If we apply these operations to existing tools then sustainable development can be effective and efficient. Also researchers should use any and all paradigms, evidence and technologies that might shed light on many contemporary issues in implementation and enhancement of sustainable development measurement tools. References Crosbie, T., Dawood, N., Dean. J., 2010, Energy profiling in the life-cycle assessment of buildings. Management of Environmental Quality: An International Journal. Vol. 21 (1), 20 – 31 Hertin, J., 2004, Sustainability and regulatory impact assessment in the UK, by Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. Available: http://iatools.jrc.ec.europa.eu/public/IQTool/CountryStudies/UK.case.study.I.Q.Tools.pdf Last accessed 8th November 2010. Moore. S., & Wen, J. 2008, Business ethics? A global comparative study on corporate sustainability approaches. Social responsibility Journal Vol. 4 (1/2), 172-184 Philip K. 2009, Comparing socially responsible and sustainable commercial property investment, Journal of Property Investment & Finance, Vol. 27 (5), 470 – 480 Reed, R., Bilos, A., Wilkinson, S. & Schulte, K. 2009, International comparison of sustaining rating tools “School of Urban Development, QUT, Brisbane, Australia” Tambbora, M. 2009, Socio Economic Tools for sustainability impact assessment. Available: http://www.springerlink.com/content/q7n5mukv657j5077/. Last accessed 8th November 2010. Read More