Developing Indicators of Sustainability in Development

The publication of the Brundtland Report titled 'Our Common Future' in 1987, gave an

impetus to the concept of sustainable development. In the post Brundtland era, nations all

over the world are concerned whether the development policies followed by them are

sustainable or not. Sustainability Indicators are in the category of green national accounts

and are different from conventional indicators of economic growth. The main areas of

discussion in this thesis are firstly to interpret the Brundtland definition of sustainable

development in terms of satisfaction of needs. A simple interpretation of the Brundtland

Commission's definition of sustainable development is that for development to be

sustainable per capita human well being should be non- declining over time. Human well

being depends on the utility of individuals and utility is dependent on the consumption of

material needs and non- material needs. Although the importance of sustainability

indicators is considerable, the challenge lies in developing frameworks to value

environmental goods and services and integrating economic and environmental

accounting into the same platform. The study focuses on the importance of measuring

non material needs or assigning monetized values to assess natural capital for strong

sustainable development. The thesis is spread over different chapters focusing on some

issues related to sustainability indicators such as weak and strong sustainability,

importance of critical natural assets in maintaining quality of life on earth, development

of Environmental Net National Product, environmental valuation techniques and dose

response functions to mention a few. The thesis describes the calculation of a clean air

index for measuring quality of life in selected urban areas of India. At the end, the thesis

highlights some limitations of developing sustainability indicators and suggests new areas

of research in the areas of resource, environment and growth economics.