Bill Grace

Healthy and resilient socio-ecological systems: Towards a common approach to sustainability assessment and management

Bill Grace
Manager Sustainability, GHD, WA

Abstract:
Despite the fact that sustainable development as a concept is now over 20 years old, and that action is being taken at an international, national, regional and level by governments, community and the private sector, there remains no standard approach to assessing the sustainability implications of existing or proposed activities.

As a result very different approaches to sustainability assessment are applied around the world, and even by the same organisations from one project to another. This situation is an impediment not only to generating a shared understanding of sustainability concepts but more importantly, identifying common approaches to improving the social and environmental consequences of proposed activities.

This paper proposes a framework within which a single broad approach to sustainability assessment and management can be consistently applied to proposed policies, programs, projects and even the production of goods and services provided by the corporate sector. The proposed framework draws on a range of existing concepts and techniques, some of which are emerging and some of which are widely used.

The proposed framework draws on “resilience” theory, an emerging approach to sustainability in which human activities are evaluated as part of a socio-ecological system. This “place-based” approach is central to the development of the common techniques for assessment and management set out in the paper.

The paper proposes a single overarching and common sustainability goal – Healthy and Resilient Socio-ecological systems. It proposes standard approaches to the analysis of impacts on socio-ecological systems arising from all forms of human activity, the development of theory-of-change based objectives, the development of intervention strategies and the implementation of these in a manner which promotes adaptive management of the affected systems by all stakeholders.

The paper also identifies the potential that such a framework has for collaboration by researchers, practitioners and stakeholders.

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