Sustainable development assessment for local land uses

The number of Sustainable Development Indicator (SDI) programmes has proliferated since the 1992 United Nations Rio Earth Summit, with indicators selected according to the particular purpose of evaluation. However, there has not yet been a comprehensive and simple SDI set that can be readily and quickly applied to land-use operations by the operators themselves to determine the extent of their progress towards sustainable development. Such a method is proposed in the following paper, based on the general principles of sustainable development endorsed at the Rio Summit and recommendations from the literature. Preliminary testing has been undertaken on several case studies and further refinement of the method is ongoing.