Sustainability measurement

The United Nations has developed extensive sustainability measurement tools in relation to sustainable development [17] as well as a System of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting.[18]

United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development

The UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) has published a list of 140 indicators which covers environmental, social, economical and institutional aspects of sustainable development.[19]

In the last couple of decades, there has arisen a crowded toolbox of quantitative methods used to assess sustainability — including measures of resource use like life cycle assessment, measures of consumption like the ecological footprint and measurements of quality of environmental governance like the Environmental Performance Index. The following is a list of quantitative "tools" used by sustainability scientists - the different categories are for convenience only as defining criteria will inter grade. It would be too difficult to list all those methods available at different levels of the organisation so those listed here are at for the global level only.

• Benchmarks

A benchmark is a point of reference for a measurement. Once a benchmark is established it is possible to assess trends and measure progress. Baseline global data on a range of sustainability parameters is available in the list of global sustainability statistics.

• Indices

A sustainability index is an aggregate sustainability indicator that combines multiple sources of data. There is a Consultative Group on Sustainable Development Indices[20]

• Metrics

Many environmental problems ultimately relate to the human effect on those global biogeochemical cycles that are critical to life. Over the last decade monitoring these cycles have become a more urgent target for research:

• Auditing

Sustainability auditing and reporting are used to evaluate the sustainability performance of a company, organization, or other entity using various performance indicators.[24] Popular auditing procedures available at the global level include:

• ISO 14000
• ISO 14031
• The Natural Step
• Triple Bottom Line Accounting
• input-output analysis can be used for any level of organization with a financial budget. It relates environmental impact to expenditure by calculating the resource intensity of goods and services.

• Reporting
  • Global Reporting Initiative modelling and monitoring procedures.[25][26][27] Many of these are currently in their developing phase.
  • State of the Environment reporting provides general background information on the environment and is progressively including more indicators.
  • European sustainability [28]
• Accounting

Some accounting methods attempt to include environmental costs rather than treating them as externalities

• Green accounting
• Sustainable value
• Sustainability economics [29]

Part of this process can relate to resource use such as energy accounting or to economic metrics or price system values as compared to non-market economics potential, for understanding resource use.[30]

An important task for resource theory (energy economics) is to develop methods to optimize resource conversion processes.[31] These systems are described and analyzed by means of the methods of mathematics and the natural sciences.[32] Human factors, however, have dominated the development of our perspective of the relationship between nature and society since at least the Industrial Revolution, and in particular, have influenced how we describe and measure the economic impacts of changes in resource quality. A balanced view of these issues requires an understanding of the physical framework in which all human ideas, institutions, and aspirations must operate.[33]

Oil imports by country

When oil production first began in the mid-nineteenth century, the largest oil fields recovered fifty barrels of oil for every barrel used in the extraction, transportation, and refining. This ratio is often referred to as the Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI or EROEI). Currently, between one and five barrels of oil are recovered for each barrel-equivalent of energy used in the recovery process.[34] As the EROEI drops to one, or equivalently the Net energy gain falls to zero, the oil production is no longer a net energy source.[35] This happens long before the resource is physically exhausted.

Note that it is important to understand the distinction between a barrel of oil, which is a measure of oil, and a barrel of oil equivalent (BOE), which is a measure of energy. Many sources of energy, such as fission, solar, wind, and coal, are not subject to the same near-term supply restrictions that oil is. Accordingly, even an oil source with an EROEI of 0.5 can be usefully exploited if the energy required to produce that oil comes from a cheap and plentiful energy source. Availability of cheap, but hard to transport, natural gas in some oil fields has led to using natural gas to fuel enhanced oil recovery. Similarly, natural gas in huge amounts is used to power most Athabasca Tar Sands plants. Cheap natural gas has also led to Ethanol fuel produced with a net EROEI of less than 1, although figures in this area are controversial because methods to measure EROEI are in debate.

Insofar as economic growth is driven by oil consumption growth, post-peak societies must adapt. M. King Hubbert believed:[36]

Our principal constraints are cultural. During the last two centuries we have known nothing but exponential growth and in parallel we have evolved what amounts to an exponential-growth culture, a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of nongrowth.

Some economists describe the problem as uneconomic growth or a false economy. At the political right, Fred Ikle has warned about "conservatives addicted to the Utopia of Perpetual Growth".[37] Brief oil interruptions in 1973 and 1979 markedly slowed - but did not stop - the growth of world GDP.[38]

Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by 250%. The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers (natural gas), pesticides (oil), and hydrocarbon fueled irrigation.[39]

David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, and Mario Giampietro, senior researcher at the National Research Institute on Food and Nutrition (INRAN), place in their study Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy the maximum U.S. population for a sustainable economy at 200 million. To achieve a sustainable economy world population will have to be reduced by two-thirds, says the study.[40] Without population reduction, this study predicts an agricultural crisis beginning in 2020, becoming critical c. 2050. The peaking of global oil along with the decline in regional natural gas production may precipitate this agricultural crisis sooner than generally expected. Dale Allen Pfeiffer claims that coming decades could see spiraling food prices without relief and massive starvation on a global level such as never experienced before.[41][42]

Hubbert Peak vs Oil Production

There is an active debate about most suitable sustainability indicator's use and by adopting a thermodynamic approach through the concept of "exergy" and Hubbert peaks, it is possible to incorporate all into a single measure of resource depletion.The exergy analysis of minerals could constitute a universal and transparent tool for the management of the earth's physical stock.[43][15]

Hubbert peak can be used as a metric for sustainability and depletion of non-renewable resources. It can be used as reference for many metrics for non-renewable resources such as:[44]

1. Stagnating supplies
2. Rising prices
3. Individual country peaks
4. Decreasing discoveries
5. Finding and development costs
6. Spare capacity
7. Export capabilities of producing countries
8. System inertia and timing
9. Reserves-to-production ratio
10. Past history of depletion and optimism

Although Hubbert peak theory receives most attention in relation to peak oil production, it has also been applied to other natural resources.

Doug Reynolds predicted in 2005 that the North American peak would occur in 2007.[45] Bentley (p. 189) predicted a world "decline in conventional gas production from about 2020".[46]

Peak coal is significantly further out than peak oil, but we can observe the example of anthracite in the US, a high grade coal whose production peaked in the 1920s. Anthracite was studied by Hubbert, and matches a curve closely.[47] Pennsylvania's coal production also matches Hubbert's curve closely, but this does not mean that coal in Pennsylvania is exhausted—far from it. If production in Pennsylvania returned at its all-time high, there are reserves for 190 years. Hubbert had recoverable coal reserves worldwide at 2500 × 10⁹ metric tons and peaking around 2150(depending on usage).

More recent estimates suggest an earlier peak. Coal: Resources and Future Production (PDF 630KB [48]), published on April 5, 2007 by the Energy Watch Group (EWG), which reports to the German Parliament, found that global coal production could peak in as few as 15 years.[49] Reporting on this Richard Heinberg also notes that the date of peak annual energetic extraction from coal will likely come earlier than the date of peak in quantity of coal (tons per year) extracted as the most energy-dense types of coal have been mined most extensively.[50] A second study, The Future of Coal by B. Kavalov and S. D. Peteves of the Institute for Energy (IFE), prepared for European Commission Joint Research Centre, reaches similar conclusions and states that ""coal might not be so abundant, widely available and reliable as an energy source in the future".[49]

Work by David Rutledge of Caltech predicts that the total of world coal production will amount to only about 450 gigatonnes.[51] This implies that coal is running out faster than usually assumed.

Finally, insofar as global peak oil and peak in natural gas are expected anywhere from imminently to within decades at most, any increase in coal production (mining) per annum to compensate for declines in oil or NG production, would necessarily translate to an earlier date of peak as compared with peak coal under a scenario in which annual production remains constant.

In a paper in 1956,[52] after a review of US fissionable reserves, Hubbert notes of nuclear power:

There is promise, however, provided mankind can solve its international problems and not destroy itself with nuclear weapons, and provided world population (which is now expanding at such a rate as to double in less than a century) can somehow be brought under control, that we may at last have found an energy supply adequate for our needs for at least the next few centuries of the "foreseeable future."

Technologies such as the thorium fuel cycle, reprocessing and fast breeders can, in theory, considerably extend the life of uranium reserves. Roscoe Bartlett claims [53]

Our current throwaway nuclear cycle uses up the world reserve of low-cost uranium in about 20 years.

Caltech physics professor David Goodstein has stated[54] that

... you would have to build 10,000 of the largest power plants that are feasible by engineering standards in order to replace the 10 terawatts of fossil fuel we're burning today ... that's a staggering amount and if you did that, the known reserves of uranium would last for 10 to 20 years at that burn rate. So, it's at best a bridging technology ... You can use the rest of the uranium to breed plutonium 239 then we'd have at least 100 times as much fuel to use. But that means you're making plutonium, which is an extremely dangerous thing to do in the dangerous world that we live in.

Hubbert applied his theory to "rock containing an abnormally high concentration of a given metal"[55] and reasoned that the peak production for metals such as copper, tin, lead, zinc and others would occur in the time frame of decades and iron in the time frame of two centuries like coal. The price of copper rose 500% between 2003 and 2007[56] was by some attributed to peak copper.[57][58] Copper prices later fell, along with many other commodities and stock prices, as demand shrank from fear of a global recession.[59] Lithium availability is a concern for a fleet of Li-ion battery using cars but a paper published in 1996 estimated that world reserves are adequate for at least 50 years.[60] A similar prediction [61] for platinum use in fuel cells notes that the metal could be easily recycled.

Phosphorus supplies are essential to farming and depletion of reserves is estimated at somewhere from 60 to 130 years.[62] Individual countries supplies vary widely; without a recycling initiative America's supply [63] is estimated around 30 years.[64] Phosphorus supplies affect total agricultural output which in turn limits alternative fuels such as biodiesel and ethanol.

Hubbert's original analysis did not apply to renewable resources. However over-exploitation often results in a Hubbert peak nonetheless. A modified Hubbert curve applies to any resource that can be harvested faster than it can be replaced.[65]

For example, a reserve such as the Ogallala Aquifer can be mined at a rate that far exceeds replenishment. This turns much of the world's underground water [66] and lakes [67] into finite resources with peak usage debates similar to oil. These debates usually center around agriculture and suburban water usage but generation of electricity [68] from nuclear energy or coal and tar sands mining mentioned above is also water resource intensive. The term fossil water is sometimes used to describe aquifers whose water is not being recharged.

• Fisheries: At least one researcher has attempted to perform Hubbert linearization (Hubbert curve) on the whaling industry, as well as charting the transparently dependent price of caviar on sturgeon depletion.[69] Another example is the cod of the North Sea.[70] The comparison of the cases of fisheries and of mineral extraction tells us that the human pressure on the environment is causing a wide range of resources to go through a depletion cycle which follows a Hubbert curve.