Sustainability Monitoring and Assessment: New Challenges Require New Thinking

Sustainable development has become a popular concept in recent years. The threats of global climate change and a looming water crisis have made us aware of the need for more prudence in selecting development options. Water professionals have demonstrated a burgeoning interest in sustainability, especially through a growing literature promoting systems approaches for integrated and sustainable water-resources management (e.g., Simonovic 1996; Loucks 1997, 2000; Cai et al. 2002; Sandoval-Solis et al. 2011). There is an emerging understanding that some careful attention is required to figure out what the term really means. Apart from the setting up of the Dublin Conference in 1992, at the global scale, water professionals have not been especially prominent in the explanation or promotion of the paradigm shift called for by the quest for sustainable development. This editorial argues that owing to the prevailing confusion in sustainability terms, perceptions, and concepts, the actions and policies advocated by mainstream water managers and scientists cannot, and do not, conform to the basic idea of sound and socially equitable development. There is reason to voice serious concern about the questions water professionals ask and the answers they provide concerning sustainable development and water resources sustainability. There is definitely a need to clarify the semantics and to identify some weaknesses in current concepts and reasoning. As Lund (2013) points out, water management is often very different from what we think intuitively or what we have been taught. There are five major issues that should be considered by our community for sustainability monitoring and assessment, which will be addressed throughout this editorial: 1. Sustainable development is an emergent feature. Sustainability is a moving-target that we should chase to make the world better over time. It is not a static goal nor a number to be increased or decreased (Hjorth and Bagheri 2006; Bagheri and Hjorth 2007a). Sustainability is more of a quality issue, like justice and freedom. Sustainable development is a process, not a product. The hallmarks of the engineer have been a measuring stick and a slide rule (today replaced by computers). Engineers tend to define and solve problems in ways that can be measured and calculated. They often try to express sustainability in terms of a number, a sustainability index. However, in changing, complex and uncertain contexts such as water resource problems, abstract indices (e.g., reliability, water use/water availability ratio, and water stress) can be of little help, or even mislead. Identifying sustainable solutions for this type of complex problems requires a holistic understanding and approach (Simonovic 2009; Mirchi et al. 2012). There is a growing understanding that sustainability is not a static end-state but rather an emerging, albeit complex, process with new notions coming along as people discuss possible solutions and new ways to apply and evaluate them (Mitroff and Linstone 1993; Bossel 1999; Veeman and Politylo 2003; Meadows et al. 2004). Limited understanding of such emergent order has, as yet, caused sustainability to have minimal influence on mainstream theory and practice in management and strategy (Kurtz and Snowden 2003). This editorial calls for a new focus. 2. Understanding the ground truth is essential to develop sustainable solutions. Often, we jump too fast into trying to forecast, predict, and solve the issues without having a comprehensive understanding of the problem. The result has been many unintended consequences today, caused by “brilliant” solutions in the past. Water resources are complex systems comprised of natural, social, political, and physical subsystems that dynamically and continuously interact (Veeman and Politylo 2003; Madani and Marino 2009; Simonovic 2009; Gohari et al. 2013). Part of the art of water resource systems analysis is determining where to draw the boundary and identifying the system to analyze given the available resources (time, money, data, and talent). Poorly chosen boundaries can result in “smart” solutions that are associated with a range of undesirable impacts and unintended consequences (Mirchi et al. 2010). The sustainability debate makes it quite clear that traditional water management focused on water development without consideration of social and ecosystem impacts is no longer sufficient. Unfortunately, this does not indicate a common understanding of the sustainability concept (Hjorth and Madani 2013). As time goes by and experience accumulates, we often understand, expect, and invest in our system as it was, rather than as it might become. A conservative bias is built in and gives us confidence (Douglas 1966). So, we increasingly face situations where assumptions about how the world works are invalid or suboptimal, yet our tools and procedures assume these assumptions and past operations hold true (Guijt 2008). 3. While we have a tendency to always welcome technical solutions, we have to respect the fact that sustainability belongs to the class of “no technical solution problems” (Hardin 1968). While sustainable development can benefit from systems tools, sustainability is not a simple optimization problem with a unique Pareto-optimal solution set. We need to learn as we go searching for sustainability, an effort in which we will, most probably, be making some mistakes. We frequently aim for an optimal solution. Computing power may help in some contexts, but is often less central for managing people and knowledge (Kurtz and Snowden 2003). Truly optimal design is usually unavailable to mere mortals. In a complex world, populated by individuals with diverse interests and tastes, and enmeshed in uncertainty about the future, far too many alternatives exist; the number of combinations of potential actions is far larger than what analysts