Kaylin Chin

Evaluating Sustainable Development Across the continuous United States: Application of the United Nations' Indicators of Sustainable Development ©2015

Sustainable development has become an increasingly important topic over the last 30 years, as accelerated rates of resource consumption and climate change have altered the environment we live in. Sustainable development incorporates aspects of socioeconomics, environmental science, and governance to manage issues that negatively impact human-environmental systems across spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, it is critical to quantify development at local and regional scales to encourage progress towards sustainability. Measuring sustainable development is complex as there are many different indicators created to evaluate sustainability. As such, there remains no consensus towards a subset of metrics or assessment methodologies. To help operationalize sustainable development, an applied study was conducted at the county scale for the contiguous United States. Social, economic, and environmental variables were selected based on their applicability to the United Nations' (2007) report Indicators of Sustainable Development: Guidelines and Methodologies. A heuristic methodology is presented that connects a multivariate factor analysis, local spatial autocorrelation, and cluster analysis to systematically assess sustainable development at the county scale for the contiguous United States. It was found that sustainable development indicators can be reduced to a meaningful set of core meta-variables based on the factor analysis, and that there is a spatial dependency between factors. Additionally, clusters of counties with similar sustainable development progress and practises were created across the United States, which can help guide sustainability policies and initiatives in these areas.