Back to Sustainable Indicators: A Review of National Methods and Suggestions for Long Island		EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development's 1987 report Our Common Future brought the terms "sustainability" and "sustainable development"into widespread use. The report defines sustainable development as ìdevelopment which meets the needs of the present without endangering the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." This definition is the one used most often throughout the world. In working towards sustainability in our communities, we can use indicators to monitor our progress and inform our public policies. Indicators are data and statistics that highlight key parameters in our biophysical and social systems. They tell us which direction a critical aspect of our community, economy, or environment is going: improving, deteriorating, or staying the same. Without indicators, we have no objective measures of our progress towards sustainability. Indicators can help us gauge what we should do more of, less of, or what issues we need to rethink. Indicators that are carefully designed, watched, and interpreted can help us create sustainable communities. An example of a widely used economic indicator is the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The Dow does not measure the entire stock market, only 30 large corporations. These stocks are market leaders, so changes in the Dow often signal changes in the stock market as a whole. Another commonly used economic indicator is Gross National Product (GNP). Increases in GNP do not always signify net improvements in quality of life. For example, GNP increases when rainforests are logged or when companies clean up toxic waste spills. Also GNP masks disparities in the distribution of wealth. As a society, we are overly reliant upon indicators like GNP and the Dow. We need to establish a more complex set of indicators to adequately measure our quality of life and well being. Sustainable Seattle's indicator project has been used as a model for many regional indicator projects in the U.S. and around the world. Sustainable Seattle is a volunteer organization made up of individuals from the business, environmental, city and county government, labor, social activist, and religious communities in Seattle and the surrounding Puget Sound region. Sustainable Seattle chose 40 indicators for research and publication. They also established goals and objectives to monitor their progress over time. This project was effective for several reasons. First, it was a grassroots, broad-based effort. Second, their results were widely disseminated. Finally, they continue to monitor and report on the region's progress toward sustainability. Many regional projects are now underway in the U.S. and around the world. We recently reviewed ten projects, including Wilapa, Washington; Santa Monica, California; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Jacksonville, Florida; and the states of Oregon and Minnesota. These projects help us to see the wide range of alternative methodologies that communities and regions can use in fashioning their indicator projects. These projects differ in their reliance upon governmental agencies, their usage of policy objectives, their capacity to monitor regional progress over time, and their methods of public education and outreach. Some indicator projects were created by grassroots organizations in a "bottom-up" fashion. Others were developed by government agencies in a "top-down" fashion. What each of these regions has learned is that indicators are a vital tool for transforming sustainability into a realistic policy and planning framework. It is therefore critical that indicator projects get underway on Long Island. Local indicator projects help specific communities identify, monitor, and solve their problems and concerns. Some possible indicators for Long Island communities include farmland acreage, gender and racial disparities in unemployment rates, cancer rates, and commuting costs. While there is no one correct way to conduct an indicator study, we offer the following sample methodology. First, communities should critically review a range of indicator studies, through reports such as this one. "Bottom-up" projects should then organize a broad spectrum of community leaders who can begin to craft their own local indicators. Second, participants should break down into task forces on specific subjects. Seattle divided its indicators into five categories: Environment, Population and Resources, Economy, Youth and Education, and Health and Community. Tufts University used four "pathways": economic security, ecological integrity, quality of life, and empowerment with responsibility. Each task force should select a fixed number of indicators that they feel are most important. Participants should receive some training in this process. Third, once a set of indicators is agreed upon, a draft report should be published and widely disseminated. This process will generally take a minimum of six months. The report can be finalized once the full community has a chance to review and refine the report. "Top-down" projects can accomplish much of the same objectives. Rather than having many open public forums, however, the task force would instead visit a broad range of civic organizations, businesses, and government agencies and receive their input directly. These stakeholders should have several opportunities to comment upon the indicators selected. The benefit of this kind of "top-down" process is that the task force does not face the logistical problem of getting large numbers of individuals to participant in public forums on a regular basis. Key components of any indicator report should be the active participation of local government and local citizens and the creation of policy objectives to ensure that indicator values improve over time (e.g., recycling rates increase).