Sustainability evaluation: diverging routes recombined? Tasks for a new Working Group on Modelling and Evaluation for Sustainability

In making practical decisions on technologies and products and related strategies and policies, all sustainability effects are involved, from global warming and income distribution to economic growth and habitat destruction. Judging the relative importance of these different effects, that is their evaluation, is unavoidable. Reality just is that complex. The only choice is if the judgement is made implicitly or explicitly. In the environment domain of sustainability there are at least four basically different approaches to evaluation and the underlying modelling, and at least one approach focussing on efficiency only, all with diverging outcomes. A working group involving different scientific societies is being set up to actively relate the different approaches and to see how at a practical level they might be reconciled.