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Box 35 From SoE to Sustainability Reporting for Cities
Peter W. Newton
In 2007 we had the twentieth anniversary of the
Brundtland Report
,
1
which launched sustain-
ability as an increasingly powerful driving force for change in thinking across government,
industry and community sectors. It encouraged an important shift from the rather narrow en
-
vironmental thinking and measurement of the 1970s, which focused on individual performance
indicators, end-of-pipe solutions and compliance, to an approach now increasingly aligned with
systems thinking, solutions linked to understanding of systems performance and innovation in
design, science and technology, and creative partnerships (eg public–private or private–com
-
munity) for delivery of solutions. State of Environment (SoE) reporting represented a first
attempt at the application of systems thinking to environmental assessment and reporting via
its Pressure–State–Response Model, albeit restricted initially to solely environmental domains.
2
SoE reporting has subsequently been extended to embrace a broader framework, including
driving forces, direct pressures, condition (state) implications, responses, effectiveness (moni
-
toring),
3
and the inclusion of the built environment as a key area.
4
SoE reporting, as currently applied in most contexts, is episodic (every five years in most juris
-
dictions), is poorly supported from a data perspective, operates primarily within solo domains
(eg atmosphere, land or inland waters themes), has little facility for multi-factor analysis, and,
as its title suggests, is reporting on current conditions and recent trends rather than exploring
future development scenarios and their sustainability. An extended urban metabolism model
was devised as a framework for SoE reporting on human settlements in Australia in 1996 and
has evolved to the version used in the 2006 Report.
5
It has normative value in being able to
articulate key sustainability goals, such as reduced resource use, reduced waste and emissions,
greater liveability and human wellbeing, improved urban systems and processes, and improved
urban environmental quality. These five key aspirational goals have also found their way into
government sustainability action statements for metropolitan development
6
together with
more explicit targets and metrics.
The basis for a transition to sustainability reporting is, however, emerging from within individual
SoE thematic areas (eg human health impacts modelling in the Atmosphere theme). In the
Human Settlements domain, metabolic stocks and flows modelling has now been extended from
national
7
to sub-metropolitan scale.
8
This permits exploration of future urban development
scenarios associated with a range of alternative populations and land uses, at varying densities,
with an ability to assess city ‘performance’ in terms of key indicators such as conversion of
greenspace, consumption of water, energy and building materials, and bio-region impacts (eg
quality of receiving waters, urban airshed quality and change in catchment land use). It also
provides a platform for exploring the impact on cities of key exogenous pressures such as
climate change, peak oil, potential health pandemics and alternative food futures. Additional
challenges will revolve around estimating the relative contributions that patterns of household
consumption (ie behaviour) versus patterns of urban development (eg housing densities and
land use–transport configurations) make to urban sustainability.
The challenge will be to initiate studies on Australian cities with a scope equivalent to that
outlined above if we are to begin to match the impact that the Australian Treasury’s (2002)
Intergenerational Report has had in firstly identifying and then engaging with the challenges
facing a Federal Government in relation to its fiscal sustainability – that is, matching future
outlays on health, care for the elderly, welfare payments, education and training, environment,
etc against sources of future income – all within a context of the nation’s future demographic
(ageing and migration) and economic (growth, productivity and employment) prospects.
9
At
present the domain specific (water, energy, waste, transport, housing, etc) vulnerabilities of
Australia’s cities as identified in the 2006 SoE Report
10
have not been combined and projected
into the future to the extent necessary to define urban sustainability crises of a magnitude to
which a national response is required.
321
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