Can we quantify sustainability? --- A personal thought on "Global Sustainable Competitiveness I

Because sustainability is a diverse topic that encompasses so many issues and facets of our political and socio-ecological systems, it can be very difficult to quantify sustainability. There has been a recent push to do so, including in higher education, in business, and even for whole countries. One ranking system - the Global Sustainable Competitiveness Index - which relates sustainability at a national level with national competitiveness will be discussed in this article.

The Sustainable Competitiveness World Map 2017, by SolAbility

One challenge of these ranking systems is that there are multiple factors that will affect a country’s degree of sustainability. To fairly judge and normalize them is very hard.

This ranking reminds me the “World Top University Rankings”. When I applied colleges in high school, I looked through those rankings, especially one ranked by “U.S. News”. However, there are multiple ranking systems for world universities. For example, “U.S. News Best global universities” ranks world universities very different from ”QS world university rankings”. In 2017, UCI is ranked 65 by U.S. News and 156 by QS. Both ranking system covers similar topics, such as academic reputation, employer reputation, performance of different schools, .etc. But since they normalize things differently, the ranking becomes very different.

Similar to the Global Sustainable Competitiveness Model. Even though it covers five aspects— “Governance”, “Intellectual Capital”, “Social Capital”, “Resource Management” and “Natural Capital”— and normalize them based on different situations in different countries, just relying on this single ranking system is hard to be precise.

But since this ranking system evaluates five different factors and ranks all of them in order to come up the final score, it can make people easily understand which part of this country needs help to be more sustainable, instead of just looking an overall poor score and blaming that this country is doing something horrible.

In this competitiveness ranking, China is ranked 37 with score 47.2, and the U.S. ranked 32 with 47.6. I don’t really agree with that. If people just glance this one ranking without understanding how those five factors (“Governance”, “Intellectual Capital”, “Social Capital”, “Resource Management” and “Natural Capital”) are normalized, they will think that U.S. is more sustainable than China. But from individual levels, this is not true. And individual levels matter because of huge population. If countries with large populations believe that U.S. is more sustainable, at least it is ranked on the top 20% of 180 countries, there will be problems. In the “Natural Capital” Ranking, China is ranked 155 compares to 31 for the U.S., and for this ranking it states that “there are limitations to human ability to improve or change the available natural capital”. This unchangeable factor has been affected by the dense population, therefore China is ranked so much lower than the U.S.. Another factor is the “Resource Management” ranking, U.S. is ranked 161 for it’s poor resource management and high cost. But China is ranked 166, even lower. This score is “scored relative to population (e.g. GHG per capita) as well as relative to economic output (e.g. energy consumption per GDP)”. Overall, the way that this ranking system is normalized can be very different and each country can have a very different score. Just like UCI can be ranked 65 and 156 at the same time by two different ranking system.

There is misleading and confusing information can be conveyed by a ranking system, but it is still important to have them. Thus people can have a general idea about how much efforts should be given to make things more sustainable, and have the motivation to compete with each other.