Ecometrics for life cycle management: A conflict between sustainable development and family values?

Metrics are a prerequisite for the successful monitoring and management of progress toward goals. Within the context of sustainable development these 'values' are stakeholder dependent with the interests of the individual, society, the environmental infrastructure and intergenerational liability differing significantly. These stakeholder priorities may also be mutually inconsistent or simultaneously unattainable. Therefore, a set of scale- and value-specific indicators will be required to represent the priorities of individuals, religious organizations, political and public interest groups, non-government organizations, firms and industry associations, as well as national and international institutions. Restricting the number of ecometrics, or creating aggregated sustainability indicators, risks disenfranchisement and invalidation respectively. Over the past three decades a series of microecometrics have been developed to account for the impact of human activity, technology or products over regional, national, and sub- continental scales. These include life cycle energy consumption, dematerialization, waste minimization, as well as design for environment and eco-efficiency indicators, the latter two combining technological or economic aspects respectively with environmental factors. Metrics which evaluate the impact of a service, or the utility provided by a product, are lacking. A series of global measures, or macroecometrics have also been defined and include the average annual temperature as well as atmospheric compositions and concentrations, sea level, and earth based resources such as topsoil quantities. The validity of microecometrics as measures of global phenomena can be established through life cycle impact assessments which evaluate the 'system's' response to effects of products or services throughout their life cycle. However, the link between microecometrics and macroecometrics, their validity as indicators of sustainability, the subjectivity of sustainable development per se as a value, and the relationship of metrics and sustainable development with family values has not extensively been addressed. This paper summarizes recently proposed ecometrics, calls for the recognition of the subjectivity of indicators, the distinction between ecometrics used for internal corporate reporting and external decision making, and the establishment of a representative multistakeholder debate.