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Data and tools to support sustainable communities
AED scientists help communities identify and develop indicators to evaluate the current and future status of the environment, diagnose problems, and track the performance of various approaches, with the goal of measuring the effects and efficacy of environmental policy decisions.
Project: Framing Sustainable Decisions and Enhancing Collaboration
Research task: Perspectives analysis and systems thinking
This AED research task focuses on understanding and incorporating stakeholder values, identifying and characterizing types of communities and decisions faced by community leaders, developing profiles of the types of contexts in which decisions are made, and types of behavior that people or entities exhibit when making decisions. This work uses community knowledge and adaptive management to show how the characteristics of a community affects decision making behavior, what the most common barriers to decision making are, and where major decisions can best be influenced to advance sustainability goals. The analysis of decision frameworks assists communities in moving toward sustainability through more effective and informed decision-making.
AED Task Lead: Marilyn Tenbrink
Project: National Atlas for Sustainability
Research task: Development of sustainability metrics associated with the built environment for the National Atlas for Sustainability
Money is the common economic metric accounting system used by people, and emergy is proposed as Nature’s accounting quantity to put a value on the goods and services supplied by the environment. Emergy represents all of the available energy of a single type of product or service (e.g., solar equivalent joules) previously consumed directly or indirectly to make another product or service. AED researchers are developing and testing models for Emprint, which is a graphic expression summarizing the sustainability and self-sufficiency of any system using a simple visual design. Emprint shows percentages of renewable and non-renewable emergy and the quantity that is local, imported, or exported from any environmental system. Once this approach is validated it can be applied to territorial systems at any scale of organization.
AED Task Lead: Dan Campbell