Critical thresholds, evaluation and regional development

This paper is part of the Special Issue of European Environment devoted to the outputs of the EU SRDTOOLS project, which developed and applied a new model of regional sustainable development evaluation. This paper introduces as an evaluation criterion the idea of critical thresholds, which up to now have not been sufficiently integrated into thinking and decision making in the context of regional development. Decision making explicitly or implicitly accepts trade‐offs across economic, social, human and nature domains. Some of these trade‐offs, especially when they may threaten system integrity, are not sufficiently understood. The paper discusses how critical thresholds and trends can be integrated into evaluation methods and provides some insights from practical applications. It concludes that such integration into regional planning and evaluation should support objectives for sustainable development and improve decision making and environmental governance.