Provides a forum for measuring the San Francisco Bay Area's progress toward the achievement of regional sustainability: a healthy environment, vibrant economy, and equitable society.
Redefining Progress, a nonprofit sustainability think tank, established the Regional Sustainability initiative in 2003 to serve the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area.
Scenarios for Sustainability Toolkit
Despite their regional impacts, debates over how much and where to develop and what form that development should take are debates that occur at the local level. Due to their highly politicized nature, they cry out for impartial analysis that can translate environmental, economic, and social sustainability rhetoric into measurable outcomes. To meet this need, Redefining Progress (RP) developed its Scenarios for Sustainability (S2) toolkit.
S2 provides decision makers with quantitative information about the degree to which alternative planning and policy options achieve environmental, economic, and social sustainability objectives. It does so by adapting elements of two well-known sustainability indicators down to the local level: the Ecological Footprint, and the Genuine Progress Indicator.
S2 is a flexible land-use planning framework that incorporates dozens of sustainability indicators. Appropriate indicators to be analyzed within that framework are selected on a case by case basis.
Three recent applications—Hacienda Business Park, Coyote Valley, and the Big Box Calculator demonstrate S2's usefulness in urban planning scenarios of differing scales. For a complete description of S2 indicators (PDF, 86kb), click here.
If your region or community is interested in learning more about how to measure its progress toward sustainability or if you have resources you'd be interested to link to this website, please contact Redefining Progress at sustainability@rprogress.org
Copyright 2006 Redefining Progress
