A systems approach to identifying decisive information for sustainable development

Many governments are striving to implement sustainable development programs. While there are many definitions of ‘sustainability’, most agree that a more comprehensive information infrastructure including economic, social, environmental, and cultural measures is required to assess courses of action and evaluate progress. Also critical is the development of information about the structure and behavior of the systems in which decisions are made. Most of the efforts toward the identification of information to support sustainable development decision making have focused on developing measures of progress toward sustainability. The Pressure-State-Response framework has been suggested as a method for capturing perceptions of causality. This framework fails to capture important information about complex causal relationships and system behavior. A systems approach to identifying decisive information is discussed as an alternative. This approach supports the identification of relationships among the indicators, learning about the behavior of the system, and provides a common language for interdisciplinary communication.